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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 



f6? 






Copyright, 191 1, 
By Jennings and Graham 



5CLA292619 






I 



CONTENTS 



Preface, 7 

The Leakage of Power, - 11 

The Fight of the Soul, - 43 

The Lure of the Quiet, - 89 

The Love that Abides, - - - 113 

The Empty Crib, 149 

The Longing for Home, - - - 171 



To the Gentle Reader: 

In classic days Time was painted or 
sculptured as full-winged. Tempus fu- 
git is a quotation in every tongue. But 
Chronos is not always in the air. Dur- 
ing the day while absorbed in work we 
take no note of the flight of time. The 
busy hours, like flying birds, pass over 
our heads, and we observe them not. 
They are Winged Hours. 

But when the day's work is done and 
one is away from home and alone, the 
hours drag heavily ; not with light wing 
do they come or go, but with feet of 
lead. These are the Wingless Hours. 

Idle moments, however, need not, like 
mountain streams, go to waste. Many 
a wheel may be turned by waters that 
aimlessly flow. Spare moments contrib- 
ute largely to the world's wealth, and 

7 



PREFACE 

the quiet hour may become the golden 
opportunity for highest intellectual or 
spiritual enjoyment and profit — quiet 
moments when the soul shut in from the 
sights and sounds of the garish day may 
strengthen its waning powers in medita- 
tion, or hold high converse with the real 
kings of men, and find itself "never so 
little alone as when alone." 

Possibly, you have often wished for 
a little book which you could dip into 
anywhere to beguile an idle hour, and 
for you and for all other thoughtful 
souls who amid the carking cares of life 
yet live in the world of the spirit, these 
few pages — by-products of spare mo- 
ments — are written, to warn, strengthen, 
sweeten and console. They are not ser- 
mons, they are really not essays, they are 
simply the collected dreamings of the 
Wingless Hour. 




THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

And he wist not that the Lord was de- 
parted from him. — Judges 16 : 20. 

It went gradually. As the light dies 
upon the hills, as a gorgeous sunset 
fades into colorless glow, and evening 
slowly sinks into loneliness and night — 
so went the Spirit of God. Samson did 
not know it was gone. He was asleep. 
But back of the sleep, the sleep of death 
in the lap of Delilah, were days of dally- 
ing with sin, of playing with it, seeking 
it, indulging in it, and all those days led 
up to the fatal hour when, like an Em- 
peror bartering an Empire for a bauble, 
he abandoned himself to the power of 
sin and lost the power of God. Shorn 
locks — shorn strength! Forgetting the 
stars, he sank in the mire. 
II 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Born of godly parents, consecrated to 
the service of God, destined savior of 
his country — great things were expected 
of Samson. But he was a disappoint- 
ment. Of all disappointments he was 
the worst. He played the fool. He 
played it with his eyes wide open. He 
played it, as many another has played 
it, against every restraining influence of 
home and religion and interest and call- 
ing. A traitor to himself, he played 
false to every holy thing. The glamour 
of life outside his circle, the morally dis- 
integrating power of unholy love, the 
fascinating charm of novel experiences 
among strange people, so unlike the 
quiet simplicity of his Israelitish home, 
appealed mightily to his imagination, to 
every vibrant nerve of his lawless being. 
He gloried in his strength. He ridi- 
culed the dream that he could ever fall 
a victim to Philistine snares or heathen 
woman's wiles. 

12 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

But do the eyes of the basilisk ever 
wink? Does the charm of the serpent 
ever loosen its grip on the quivering 
bird? Stealthily, but persistently and 
surely, the filmy tentacles of the octopus, 
as Victor Hugo pictures for us in "The 
Toilers of the Sea," reach out for the 
neck and arms of the unthinking fisher- 
man till suddenly the mighty muscles of 
the frightful thing are wrapped around 
the shrieking victim as he is dragged 
down into the oozy depths of ocean, 
where he is not so much devoured as he 
is absorbed into the belly of the monster. 

Thus was it with the Fool of History. 
Drawn gradually from his family to a 
heathen family; from the religion of 
wholesome living to the debaucheries of 
aliens, he finally gave away the blessed 
secret of his strength. Compared to his 
pleasure, he held this gift of God as 
of little worth. And here was the depth 
of his shame, the climax of his perfidy. 

13 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

As a traitor he surrendered the keys of 
the citadel. For the fellowship of God 
he sought the love of a harlot. He flung 
away his calling as a Nazarite and de- 
voted himself to lust. Against God and 
home, church and country, honor and 
interest — Delilah won. "He told her 
all his heart and said unto her, There 
hath not come a razor upon my head 
from my mother's womb ; if I be shaven 
then my strength will go from me, and 
I shall become weak and be like any 
other man." 

Sin did not come to him. He sought 
it. He put himself in the way of it. 
He walked in the way to be shorn of 
his character and his glory, and so by 
the inevitable working of inflexible law 
he who was named Shimshon, mean- 
ing Sunlight, ended his days in darkness ! 
"And the Philistines laid hold on him 
and put out his eyes; and they brought 
him down to Gaza and bound him in 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

fetters of brass, and he did grind in the 
prison house." 

In Gaza I Of all places on earth, 
Gaza! once the scene of his mightiest 
triumphs in the days of his strength, 
now the scene of his deepest degrada- 
tion! What a tragedy! What infinite 
irony! He who once tore away the 
gates of this city and carried them away 
with a shout to the tops of the hills, 
now grinds Philistine corn as a slave in 
its prison. The strength that should 
have been used in the service of God, be- 
ing wasted, is now put to the labor of a 
beast. Too late does Samson realize 
that he played the fool and in himself 
received the reward of a fool. 

I yielded and unlocked her all my heart, 
Who with a grain of manhood well resolved 
Might easily have shaken off all her snares; 
But foul effeminacy held me yoked 
Her bond-slave. O indignity! O blot 
To Honor and Religion! Servile mind 
Rewarded well with servile punishment! 

15 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

'T is a long way from health to dis- 
ease, from strength and power to lean- 
ness and trembling. But the change is 
not sudden. Health is not lost in a day. 
In every instance there has been a leak- 
age, a stealthy flow of vigor, scarcely 
felt at first, perhaps, but which un- 
checked has gradually increased in vol- 
ume till now the physical constitution is 
undermined, the fine bloom has faded 
from the cheek, and the joy of living is 
gone. 

The saint does not turn sinner in a 
night. Experience and world-knowledge 
teaches that one does not forsake in an 
instant all that love and honor holds 
dear, the confiding wife with springtime 
love, the little ones with innocent joys 
and ringing laughter careless of the day, 
— friends and social standing and all the 
reality and richness and repose of a 
happy home for the embraces of one 
who at last is nothing but 
16 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

A rag and a bone 
And a hank of hair, 

though her cheeks be painted with the 
colors of the lily and the rose. No one 
suddenly flings to the winds the splendid 
achievements of a lifetime and plunges 
headlong into knavery and all the sure 
results of evil-doing. 

In many cultured minds the loss of 
power comes through the gradual loss 
of faith, however that may have been 
brought about. Unbelief is a sure 
leak of all spiritual power. How grad- 
ual was the drift of the great skeptic 
Renan from his simple Christian faith, 
and religious associations at Trequier, 
his birthplace, with its cathedral and 
cloisters and the picturesque practices of 
its peasantry! From Trequier, where 
he had been under the careful instruction 
of the pious clergy whom he ever after 
venerated, he went when sixteen years 
old to the St. Nicholas Academy in Paris. 
17 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

From there he went to the college at Issy 
to prepare for the renowned St. Sulpice 
Seminary in Paris. At Issy he continued 
the drift from his childhood faith which 
had imperceptibly begun some time be- 
fore. He expresses his doubts and hesi- 
tates to be ordained, though he after- 
ward submits to taking the tonsure. 
Science becomes his absorbing passion. 
"The one thing lacking," he says of 
those days, "was positive science, the 
idea of a critical search after truth. 
This superficial humanism [which he 
had been studying] kept my reasoning 
powers fallow for three years, while at 
the same time it wore away the candor 
of my faith." He begins to deny the 
possibility of miracle and revelation, 
and to substitute an ideal system of the 
universe of his own making for the liv- 
ing God. At St. Sulpice his unbelief 
deepens. "For four years," he writes 
in his "Recollections of My Youth," 
18 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

"a terrible struggle went on within me, 
until at last the phrase which I had long 
put away from me, as a temptation of 
the devil — 'It is not true' — would not 
be denied." 

The Roman Church had failed to rec- 
ognize the demands of science and the 
advent of a new era in thought. The 
drift in the case of the young Renan 
was accelerated. On October 6, 1845, 
when only twenty-two years old, he left 
the Seminary of St. Sulpice and aban- 
doned his faith in Christianity. "At 
evening bell he went down the steps for 
the last time in his cassock, crossed the 
square rapidly, and made his way to 
the neighboring hotel or lodging-house 
of Mile. Celeste. The change to lay 
attire was not at once completed. But 
in this abrupt fashion the unknown had 
been faced and Renan had flung himself 
upon the pavement of Paris." On June 
2 3> 1 863, eighteen years later, he pub- 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

lished his "Life of Jesus" one of the 
most pernicious books that ever was 
written. But when in the Church of 
St. Sulpice some years ago, to see where 
Renan once worshiped and to look at 
some old pictures there, I saw Christ 
still honored as God, and the little chil- 
dren playing in the square to the music 
of the spurting fountains and take their 
turns to run in and repeat their cate- 
chism just the same as if the Vie de Jesu 
had never been written. 

From the time that David F. Strauss 
submitted to the influence of such Ra- 
tionalists as Professors Semler and 
Paulus till he produced his unhistorical 
"Life of Jesus" which reduced the Gos- 
pel narratives to myths, and by its bold- 
ness shocked the religious sense of the 
nineteenth century, we can trace the 
gradual descent of his belief until at 
last, losing all faith in a personal God, 
he passed away in the shadows of death, 
20 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

leaving a sad memory to his only daugh- 
ter. He was only twenty-eight when his 
destructive book appeared "A young 
man full of candor, of sweetness and 
modesty; of a spirit almost mystical and 
apparently saddened by the disturbance 
which he had occasioned." But he died 
without sweetness and without hope of 
this world or of life in the next. 

And in the world of letters, how 
clearly is seen the downward slope of 
the soul from the sunny heights of 
prayer and serene faith to the darkness 
of unbelief in the life history of George 
Eliot ! Like Herbert Spencer, the great 
philosopher and her friend, she came of, 
or was related to, good Methodist stock. 
Her mother, like Spencer's mother, was 
a Methodist, and beautiful. Dinah Mor- 
ris in "Adam Bede" was George Eliot's 
aunt. George Eliot herself in early life 
was deeply pious. At nineteen she 
writes: 

21 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

"May the Lord give me such an in- 
sight into what is truly good that I may 
not rest contented with making Chris- 
tianity a mere addendum to my pursuits 
or with tacking it as a fringe to my gar- 
ments. May I seek to be sanctified 
wholly." 

Then she was a happy girl in her 
country home, helping her father make 
butter and cheese, studying Italian and 
German and French, and enjoying the 
same spiritual life as her relatives. 
Later, led astray by an infidel book on 
the "Origin of Christianity " which was 
placed in her hands, she gradually 
drifted from the faith of her childhood. 
She refuses to go to church, becomes 
alienated from her father, seeks anti- 
Christian society, becomes the translater 
of Feuerbach and Strauss, mixes with 
Agnostics, marries a man who had al- 
ready a wife and children living, and 
finally died without God or hope of im- 
22 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

mortality, and leaving to us the regret 
that such a brilliant light should sputter 
out in starless night. Do we need to 
add more names in the literary or philo- 
sophical world to show the downward 
trend of the soul that abandons the 
Gospel of Right-doing, Mary Wool- 
stonecroft, Shelley, James Mill, the 
father of John Stuart Mill, Harriet 
Martineau, for example? 

These are typical instances of the loss 
of spiritual power in matters of faith. 
How is it in the personal life? Its his- 
tory is clear. The leakage of power is 
gradual. First the unholy thought is 
held for an instant, then dismissed. It 
returns and is entertained. There is a 
feeling that it can be shaken off at any 
time. One is astonished, affronted, 
deeply insulted at the idea that he could 
be so easily, or, indeed, ever be under 
any circumstance swerved from his in- 
tegrity. "Is thy servant a dog that he 

23 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

should do this thing?" But the eyes of 
the serpent glitter. The poison works. 
The novelty fascinates. The victim 
plays with it and halfway delights in it. 
The brain-cells grow accustomed to the 
new thrill, and the thrill comes oftener 
and stronger. The soul now quarrels 
with itself. The super-man protests 
against the lower-man, and for a time 
the upper-man beats down the animal. 
But there is a rebound, a faint quiver of 
hesitancy, and — as at length the needle 
gradually yields to the relentless pull of 
the magnet — the infatuated soul finally 
surrenders to its Delilah. 

Vice is a monster of such frightful mien 
As, to be dreaded, needs but to be seen; 
But seen too oft, familiar with its face, 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 

Lucifer, Son of the Morning, who 
has been falling from Heaven all day, 
from rosy morn till dewy eve, strikes the 
24 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

earth at last. The electric fluid has 
leaked away on inducting pipes, or old 
iron, and the lights are all out! 

To what darkling worlds of duplicity 
and falsehood does this falling away 
from God and home lead the unhappy 
victim! For reality which was his he 
enters a world of shadows where the 
light is as darkness. His personality is 
changed. Changed himself, all else is 
changed. Donatello in the "Marble 
Faun," once in harmony with Nature, 
comes to the fountain to wash his guilty 
hands, but all Nature shuns him; the 
birds, the rabbits, the squirrels, they all 
flee from him. Severed from the life 
and gladness of God no one is ever the 
same again. There is opened a wide 
gulf between the backslider and the re- 
ality that was his. He lives in the 
shadow land, where the sunshine never 
sleeps on mossy banks, nor moonbeams 
frolic with the fire-flies. Home is not 

25 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

the same any more, nor the laughter of 
children. Distant, or fearful, is his 
meeting with old friends of the Sanctu- 
ary. He is so changed that he is a 
stranger in a strange land when he en- 
ters the House of God. The meaning 
of the Gospel message awakens no re- 
sponse as in former days; it is a remote, 
a far-away, fading reminiscence. Hol- 
low is the sound of sacred song and the 
voices of prayer, which like incense rise 
fragrant and sweet in the world of the 
spirit. Like Gothe's "Faust" listening 
with dead heart to the bells of Easter 
Morn, he may well say, 

Ye heavenly tones, with soft enchanting 

Your message well I hear, but faith to me 
is wanting. 

By degrees the Spirit left him. He 
knows not the moment when God for- 
sook him, forsook his soul, and left His 
26 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

sign on the door — Here Once God 
Dwelt. 

Deny it, or ignore it as we may, there 
is a Nemesis which camps on the trail 
of every violator of moral law. This is 
the universal experience of the race from 
the beginning. It is the clear-sounding 
note in Greek tragedy, in Hebrew teach- 
ing, in Roman poetry, in the stories of 
the early morning of Time which were 
old stories when Egypt and Babylon 
were laying the foundations of empire. 
Sin is its own avenger. The wages of 
sin is death. Like a poisonous microbe 
in the blood, spreading disease through 
the whole body, "Sin," says St. James, 
"when it is full grown bringeth forth 
death." 

Not since the world began did any 
one fall over that precipice of deadly 
sin who did not play on the edge of it. 
When one determines to sin, God lets 
him sin. From the pinnacle of the 
27 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Temple, fascinated by the lure of the 
world, he flings himself down. Out of 
the imagination comes the wish, and out 
of the wish springs the act. Once he 
was in Eden and walked with God. He 
was warned of evil powers, 

. . . heard born on the wind the articulate 

voice 
Of God, and Angels to his sight appeared 
Crowning the glorious hills of Paradise. 

But to what end, when he listens to the 
low whispering of the tempter in the 
rustling of the leaves and deliberately 
falls, in spite of all warning! 

The first beginning of the leakage of 
power is when one ceases to pray. No 
one who prays ever departs from God, 
nor God from him. "They that wait 
upon the Lord shall renew their 
strength, they shall mount up on wings 
as eagles, they shall run and not be 
weary, they shall walk and not faint." 
Prayer is the link which binds us to God. 
28 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

Along the conducting line of prayer 
flows the life and the power of God. 
It is the fountain where we wash and 
are clean; the open door through which 
we look up to far-away heights of spir- 
itual attainment, or behold the nearness 
of heaven and the ministering hosts of 
Mahanaim. In prayer we touch ever- 
lasting reality and know ourselves im- 
mortal. There, peace is ours, inward 
peace, flowing like a river full tide 
through all the areas of sense giving 
life and vigor to the soul. Prayer is 
the Power-house of God. No prayer, 
no power. When prayer is neglected, 
all evil is at the door. Sin crouches 
there. The soul is imprisoned in its 
own self, now a dungeon, and at the 
door sits Sin, like Milton's Death at 
the gates of Hell. Between the soul 
and God, the source of its life and 
power, the link is broken, the wires are 
down, the power is shut off, the lights 
29 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

are all out ! One more tragedy is added 
to life's sad record. Another promising 
life has gone to pieces like a ship on the 
rocks, and he who has forsaken his God 
awakes at last to realize the value of a 
reputation only when it is lost! 

How different the man who feels the 
pull of the Heavens and yields to it. 
He does n't know how gloriously strong 
he is growing. He is not thinking about 
it. Healthy people are not forever 
thinking about their health, feeling their 
pulse, testing their lungs. They live in 
the open. They are sun-lovers. The 
God-lover lives in the atmosphere of 
God. He becomes fitted to his environ- 
ment, is at home in it and nowhere else. 
He is gradually changed from strength 
and glory of spirit to higher efficiencies 
by the Spirit of all power dwelling in 
him. He does n't know the process. 
God keeps some things to Himself. He 
simply does his duty, the grace of God 

30 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

does the rest. But the power is in him. 
The glory of spiritual beauty is in him 
and works, in time, from within out- 
wardly, as if it would transform even 
the material body into its own likeness. 
It works out through every little nerve, 
through the eye, the face, the voice, and 
hand, and bearing of the whole per- 
sonality. Moses "wist not that his face 
shone." 

Spirit is self-revealing. In his "Choir 
Invisible," James Lane Allen describes 
for us an old face that was lighted with 
unseen glory: "For prayers will in time 
make the human countenance its own 
divinest altar! Years upon years of 
fine thought like music shut up within 
us, will vibrate along the nerves of ex- 
pression until the lines of the living in- 
strument are drawn into correspond- 
ence, and the harmony of visible form 
matches the unheard harmony of the 
mind." Thus we become like that we 

3i 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

love and has strongest sway over our 
inmost lives. 

But there came a change in Samson, 
and we ask in the face of hard and fast 
doctrines of Necessity, in the face of 
some modern theories of the compelling 
power of Heredity, If a man fall, may 
he rise again? Is there no return? Is 
it true that the bird with the broken 
wing will never climb the heights of 
air again? Is it true that in the nature 
of things, in the order and constitution 
of the universe Karma must forever 
work its awful power, Sin forever mean 
more sin? It is not true. Are any of 
us what we once were, innocent children 
and youth? Has the imagination never 
been stained? the conscience never out- 
raged? Have we never dropped the 
penitential tear? Have you never cried 
to yourself, 

"... Ah, for a man to rise in me, 
That the man I am may cease to be?" 

32 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

Have we not all sinned? and have we 
not been born again to newness of life? 

I called the boy to my knee one day, 

And I said: "You're just past four; 
Will you laugh in that same light-hearted way 
When you 're turned, say, thirty more ?" 
Then I thought of a past I 'd fain erase — 

More clouded skies than blue — 
And I anxiously peered in his upturned face, 
For it seemed to say: 
"Did you?" 

I touched my lips to his tiny own, 

And I said to the boy: "Heigh, ho! 
Those lips are as sweet as the hay, new-mown ; 

Will you keep them always so?" 
Then back from those years came a rakish 
song— 

With a ribald jest or two — 
And I gazed at the child who knew no wrong, 

And I thought he asked: 
"Did you?" 
I looked in his eyes, big, brown, and clear, 

And I cried: "Oh, boy of mine! 
Will you keep them true in the after-year? 

Will you leave no heart to pine?" 

3 33 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Then out of the past came another's eyes — 

Sad eyes of tear-dimmed blue — 
Did he know they were not his mother's eyes ? 
For he answered me: 
"Did you?" 

— Carl Werner. 

No, it is not true that sin must mean 
more sin. 

For like a child sent with a fluttering light 
To feel his way across a gusty night, 
Man walks the world. Again and yet again 
The lamp shall be by fits of passion slain; 
But shall not He who sent him from the door 
Relight the lamp once more, and yet once 
more? 

We know by personal experience that 
there is salvation from sin — from the 
love of it, the guilt of it, and the power 
of it. Even Prince Hal, Shakespeare's 
best-loved character, who forsook the 
decencies and honors of his father's 
court to revel with brawlers in low tav- 
erns, has in him yet tender memories of 

34 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

better days, and there does come a time 
when remorse for his evil ways and 
shame and for the grief he brought to 
his royal father's heart suddenly awak- 
ens in him a tremendous hunger for 
clean living and high thinking worthy 
of a king. There arises in his awakened 
soul such fierce contempt for his former 
days that when Falstaff, sin-bitten 
tempter of his youth, would draw him 
away again, he turns on him with re- 
proving words: 

I know thee not, old man ; fall to thy prayers. 
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! 
I long have dreamed of such a kind of man, 
So surfeit, swelled, so old, and so profane. 
But being awake, I do despise my dream. 

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest. 
Presume not that I am the thing I was; 
For God doth know, so shall the world per- 
ceive, 
That I have turned away my former self. 
So will I those that kept me company. 

35 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

And even old Falstaff, the bragging, 
drunken Falstaff, dies at last murmuring 
u o' green fields and babbling brooks," 
as if perhaps (I hope Shakespearian 
critics will forgive me) he would recall 
the Twenty-third Psalm. And why not ? 
Did not our Lord after His resurrec- 
tion, remembering Peter's fall, say, "Go, 
tell My disciples and — Peter that I go 
before them into Galilee?" 

And so Samson's hair grew again, 
and with its growth came strength. 
Deep in the dungeon of himself he 
found God and himself, and triumphed 
at last over all his enemies. And we 
shall find him again, find him in an un- 
expected place and in better company 
than we ever thought we would. We 
shall find him mentioned among the he- 
roes of Faith in the Valhalla of Israel. 
For, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
when the writer calls the roll of Israel- 

36 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

itish heroes, he says, "Time would fail 
me to tell of Gideon, Barak and Sam- 
son, who through faith subdued king- 
doms, wrought righteousness, stopped 
the mouths of lions, and put to flight 
the armies of the aliens." 

If a man fall he may rise again. The 
glory and the gladness of the Universe 
is Redemption. The leakage of moral 
character may be stopped. Sin may be 
blotted out and the haunting memory 
of it be banished forever. God does 
forgive, and the proof of it is the Cross. 
And when God forgives He forgets. 
"I will blot out your iniquities and re- 
member them against you no more for- 
ever." That is final. Like a note of 
wailing in a penitential Psalm or the sor- 
rowing spirit in the Inflamata subdued, 
rising, falling, and soaring up at last on 
the wings of faith it breaks out in peans 
of triumphal joy and deliverance, so the 

37 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

repentant soul repudiating the past may 
rise again to heights of purity and 
power. 

Power? Yes. It was Samson re- 
stored who destroyed the temple of Da- 
gon and flung the gods of the Philistines 
in the dust at last. It is he who knows 
the personal defilement of sin who can 
keep others from its foulness. It is he 
who in agony of soul has walked in the 
lurid light of Hadean shades where no 
angel ever plumed his snowy wings, that 
can lead others to the sweet light of God 
and the green meadows in the Land of 
Beulah. Once more for Winter may 
come Spring and the golden days of 
Summer! Once more may anthems of 
praise fill the Cathedral of the Soul as 
in other days "when prayer was the ec- 
stasy of bliss," and all the sin and shame 
of life pass forever; 

Like a rolled syllable 
Of midnight thunder from the coming day. 

38 



THE LEAKAGE OF POWER 

There is never a day so dreary 

But God can make it bright, 
And unto the soul that trusts Him 

He giveth songs in the night. 
There is never a path so hidden 

But God can lead the way, 
If we seek for the Spirit's guidance 

And patiently wait and pray. 

There is never a cross so heavy 

But the nail-scarred hands are there, 
Outstretched in tender compassion 

The burden to help us bear. 
There is never a heart so broken 

But the loving Lord can heal, 
For the heart that was pierced on Calvary 

Doth still for His loved ones feel. 

There is never a life so darkened, 

So hopeless and unblest, 
But may be filled with the light of God 

And enter His promised rest. 
There is never a sin or sorrow, 

There is never a care or loss, 
But that we may bring to Jesus 

And leave at the foot of the cross. 

— Selected. 

39 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

And Jesus returned in the power of the 
Spirit into Galilee — Luke 4: 14, 

From the excitable throngs, with their 
buzzing curiosity, ferment of ideas and 
vague expectations, that crowded the 
banks of the Jordan to hear the Prophet 
John, Jesus, having received the bap- 
tism of the Spirit, quietly withdrew to 
the solitude of the wilderness to medi- 
tate on the ways and means of accom- 
plishing His mission. "And He was 
there in the wilderness forty days 
tempted of Satan, and was with the wild 
beasts." (Mark i: 13.) 

Thoughtful days, those in the desert, 
days fraught with eternal interest for 
humanity. Task such as was never 
man's, nor ever could be, was before 

43 



. THE WINGLESS HOUR 

him. He must see that task in all its 
vastness and vivid detail, must compre- 
hend to its uttermost depths the mean- 
ing of his call, isolation of spirit, mis- 
conception, persecution, derision, and 
death. For all this he must make up 
his mind. Will he do it? Tremen- 
dous struggle in the world of the spirit ! 
For what if he were mistaken? Were 
there not two Messiahs in the Old Tes- 
tament, one the Suffering Servant of 
Jehovah, the other the Hero of Israel, 
the King who subdues all nations ? Did 
not God establish the law, ordain a 
priesthood? and must he set all this 
aside and breaking away from the inter- 
pretation of ages, and the hopes of po- 
litical Israel, engage in a life or death 
struggle with his people and the hier- 
archy? On the other side there was 
the broad road to universal conquest, to 
glory and fame. Which side will he 
take? 

44 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

Alone he enters the desert, alone he 
enters into communion with his soul. 
No, not alone. The invisible Power of 
Evil draws nigh and, using the thoughts 
that naturally arise in the mind as means 
of temptation, enters into conflict with 
the Son of God. Now, or never, will 
the Kingdom of Moral Chaos in all 
worlds rise in supreme conquest over the 
Kingdom of Righteousness and all the 
plans of God. Now, or never, will Di- 
abolus reign in history and from his 
throne influence the ages to come. 
Never was there such a conflict! All 
that came after was settled there. The 
shame and suffering, the blasphemy and 
rejection of later days were there, Geth- 
semane and Calvary and Olivet, they 
were all there. 

But it was not until Jesus was worn 
by fastings and long vigils, when the 
physical man was exhausted, that the 
Tempter began his attack. By appeal 

45 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

to his bodily wants and to all the 
thoughts and visions of a possible future 
for humanity that would possess such a 
majestic mind as Jesus', Satan sought to 
penetrate into the very depths of his 
soul and to swerve him from his de- 
pendence on God and the path of his 
calling. Decision once and forever final 
must be made. Will Jesus make it? 
Shall his kingdom be a copy of world- 
kingdoms, surpassing them in earthly 
splendor and glory plus justice and uni- 
versal brotherhood, founded on philo- 
sophical or political principles? That 
is for him to decide. He can of course 
adopt the Messianic dream of his peo- 
ple and start the flames of a holy war 
against the hated Roman, arousing all 
nations, and be carried at last in triumph 
through blood and fire to the throne of 
his father David in Jerusalem. On the 
other hand, it is for him to establish, 
instead, a Kingdom of the Spirit, a king- 

4 6 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOVL 

dom of humility, of purity and holiness. 
But this shall mean for him the blast- 
ing of his people's hopes, their fierce 
rejection of him, and an ignominious 
death. This also is for him to decide. 

Then again, will he use his powers 
for his own ends? Will he save his 
life by miraculous deed rather than as 
an ordinary man depend upon the provi- 
dence of God? Will he be forever 
tempting God to exert His power in his 
interest instead of accepting the condi- 
tions of the human life and influencing 
men, if he can, by the power of truth? 
That also is for him to decide. 

How will he decide? What argu- 
ments pro and con jostle each other 
here ! What noxious vapors arise, blind- 
ing clear vision ! What sophistry ! 
what casuistry ! what balancing of prob- 
abilities in a universe of infinitely varied 
possibilities ! Why can he not accom- 
plish his mission without suffering? 

47 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Why can he not in the extremity of 
hunger save his life by turning useless 
stones into bread ? Ah, had he done 
so we might have had bread, but no 
Christ. But suppose he should die of 
starvation in the wilderness, what good 
will that be to the Kingdom he has 
come to establish? Surely he will be 
no less loyal to God should he employ 
his power in direct need for the inter- 
est of God's Kingdom! 

Then once more, why could he not 
usher in the reign of God quicker, and 
without controversy, by flinging him- 
self down from the dizzy heights of the 
Temple in the presence of the rulers and 
the priests and all Jerusalem, thus dem- 
onstrating to them beyond quibble of 
darkest doubt his divine authority and 
power? What possible harm could 
come to any purpose of God by a 
method which saves innocence from 
death, which does quickly and univer- 

4 8 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

sally what can be accomplished other- 
wise only through the slow process of 
preaching. Here is the fight of the soul ! 
One of two paths he must choose. 
One, the path of self-preservation, of 
glory and fame. The other, the thorny 
way, self-abasement, lowly service, suf- 
fering, death — the Way of the Cross. 

Jesus decided. Instantly he made 
his choice. No false reasoning, no so- 
phistications of conscience, no fear of 
death or consequences to himself, could 
blind his soul to the light. Fall he 
could, but he would not. Over against 
the ever-present "I Can/' stood the ever- 
lasting "I Will Not." He thrust aside 
the crown of the world, and took, in- 
stead, the crown of thorns! 

O Christ— 

"Victorious deeds 
Flamed in Thy heart, heroic acts — one while 
To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke; 
Men to subdue, and quell, o'er all the earth, 

4 49 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Brute violence and proud tyrannic power, 
Till truth were freed, and equity restored; 
Yet held it more humane, more heavenly, first 
By winning words to conquer willing hearts 
And make persuasion do the work of fear." 

Never yet was good without conflict 
with evil. Never yet freedom without 
struggle. It is a law of life, invin- 
cible, omnipresent, and escape from it, 
in soul or body, there is none. To 
every soul of us there comes a time when 
we are driven into the Wilderness to be 
tempted of the devil, for there is our 
temptation and there is our wilderness 
and there is our destiny wherever we 
face a moral crisis in the soul. 

"Temptation in the wilderness!" ex- 
claims Teufelsdroch. "Have we not all 
to be tried with such? . . . Name it 
as we choose: with or without visible 
devil, whether in the natural desert of 
rocks and sands or in the populous moral 
desert of selfishness and baseness, — to 
5° 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

such temptation are we called. Un- 
happy if we are not! Unhappy if we 
are but half-men, in whom that divine 
hand-writing has never blazed forth, all 
subduing, in true sun-splendor; but quiv- 
ers dubiously amid meaner lights; or 
smolders in dull pain, in darkness, un- 
der earthly vapors!" 

In the innermost being of him is 
man's battleground, and the decisive 
choice of good or evil must be fought 
out there to ultimate finish. Compro- 
mise there can be none, for that itself 
is defeat. Nor can there be postpone- 
ment. That too is defeat. The su- 
preme moment is now, and the soul now 
must fight or die. Only thus can the 
soul ever come into conscious triumph 
over evil. Lacking this consciousness, 
what sense has it other than of flat sub- 
jection to evil? By conflict only comes 
knowledge of power over the things of 
darkness, gorgons and shapes from the 

51 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

abyss, spectres of the; cave and dragons 
of the slime. For unless strength is 
tested, what clear fact of your strength 
is known to you ? What have you done? 
What enemy have you felled? "Let 
not him that girdeth on his armor boast 
himself as he that taketh it off" ( i Kings 
20: 21). 

One example is better than a thou- 
sand precepts. The pitifulest shadow 
of a man is he who is always saying what 
he can do but never does it ; who is for- 
ever sharpening the scythe but never 
cutting the grass, forever tuning the 
fiddle but never playing the music. I 
dipped again the other night into 
Amiel's Journal. What insight into 
philosophies and notions is there ! What 
discriminating criticism! what fine say- 
ings, penetrating to the heart of things ! 
what knowledge, tenderness, beauty on 
every page ! And yet what dreary, des- 
olating indecision! Like low wintry 

52 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

clouds, inertness broods over it all! It 
was always expected by his friends that 
he would do something really great, but 
the "something" never happened. 
"What use," he asks of himself, "have 
I made of my gifts . . . ? Are all the 
documents I have produced, taken to- 
gether, my correspondence, these thou- 
sands of Journal pages, my lectures, my 
articles, my poems, my notes of different 
kinds, anything better than withered 
leaves?" What was the malady which 
afflicted this fine, sensitive soul, so sad 
in its self-reproaches? Indecision! 
Amiel died a possibility, as every one 
dies who lacks the enthusiasm of doing. 
The test of skill is result. What the 
soul can do is known only by perform- 
ance. "We often know not what we 
can do," says Thomas a Kempis, "but 
temptation discovers what we are." 

Many a Pharisee is a Pharisee be- 
cause he never had a paying chance to 

53 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

become a Sadducee. It would make a 
difference in some people's moral world, 
some slight change in their self-conceit, 
if they went to bed hungry. It is the 
easiest thing in the world for stall-fed 
people of comfort and culture, dwellers 
in clean streets and luxurious palaces, 
heedless of the day and careless of the 
morrow, to tell the ignorant starvelings 
in filthy slums and sickening wretched- 
ness to be good. Come out from your 
beautiful homes, from all your rich as- 
sociations of literature and art, silken 
refinement and splendid social surround- 
ings; come out from your friends and 
your clubs, from your banquets and the 
liquid mazes of your dances, throw 
aside your soft raiment; come out from 
your world of light and beauty into this 
underworld, to these streets, to these in- 
fernos filled with raucous voices such 
as Dante heard in Malebolge — to these 
dens, to these sickening sights and 

54 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

sounds and all the dreary outlook on a 
world from which God Himself seems 
to have gone, and then try to be good! 
Come and live here ! Come down here 
and fight the fight of the soul! Well 
is it for thee if it is fought wherever 
thou art! "For, what doth it profit a 
man if he gain the whole world and lose 
his own soul ? Or, what will a man give 
in exchange for his soul?" 

He who is never sorely tempted, be- 
cause he has already surrendered, knows 
nothing of victory, of the glorious power 
of decision against one's self in self- 
denial. He is a cipher with the rim 
rubbed out. To him may be applied, 
as Amiel says, words like those with 
which Henry IV greeted the slow-mov- 
ing Crillon, after a great victory had 
been won : "Go and hang yourself, brave 
Crillon, we fought at Argues and you 
were not there." For him there re- 
mains, as a worthless thing, the scrap- 

55 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

pile of the universe which, also, at bot- 
tom, is his choice. For while every soul 
of us must enter the Wilderness some 
time or other, there are those who sur- 
render at the first suggestion of evil. 
Without a struggle they deliver them- 
selves, soul and body, for a mess of pot- 
tage. Such are no serious drain on the 
resources of Diabolus ! The grim irony 
of it, after all, is that Satan possesses 
nothing, though he makes them think he 
does, and from him they get nothing 
that is not of their own making. They 
are the veriest victims of illusion. Satan 
is the cosmic bankrupt. Stripped of all 
but the power of suggestion, he is Lord 
only of Emptiness, master of nothing, 
not even of dismalest Hell which en- 
velops him wherever he is, for the evil 
which flows from him revolves upon him 
as a whirlpool upon itself, and holds 
him in its grip. False promises are his 
resources, lies and phantoms of the brain 

56 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

conjured up in unsettled minds, by means 
of which, himself without the power to 
destroy, he persuades his victims to de- 
stroy themselves. Sin is the suicide of 
the soul. 

Into the wilderness each one goes 
alone. As both Pascal and Newman 
say, "We live alone and we die alone." 
Nous mourrons seuls. We must fight 
alone. There are no substitutes in this 
war. The rewards of victory, character, 
spiritual power, fellowship with God 
and the Warrior King Christ Jesus, 
which means supremacy over all powers 
of darkness and the fear of death, are 
for each, and the battle is for each. 
Alone, Jacob struggles with the Un- 
known in the darkness till the breaking 
of the day. Alone, Peter denied his 
Lord, though surrounded by a motley 
crowd; and though he is flung to the 
ground by the buffeting of Satan, yet 
alone he goes out into the night and 

57 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

fights it all out again till tears of re- 
pentance proclaimed him such victor 
that in days to come he will die for Him 
he once denied. 

And the reason why we must do bat- 
tle alone is, because no one can give his 
personality to another. He can not en- 
ter into the depths of another's inner- 
most being, where the man himself lives 
with all his thoughts and feelings and 
dreamings and visions, perhaps, of God 
and man and views of the smaller world 
outside of him. Another can not enter 
there and give him his belief or unbe- 
lief, his virtue or his sin. No two live 
in the same world. Though under the 
same roof they may be as far apart as 
the stars. We live alone, and the bat- 
tle of the soul must be fought alone. 

Doubts, and social conditions, and 
personal failures confront us, and they 
are mighty to stand up against. But the 
severest battle is not with doubts, re- 

58 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

ligious or other, for while one may suf- 
fer intellectual conflict, still his heart 
may, for all that, beat true to that which 
is honest and clean. It is a long way 
from Doubt to Denial, though both live 
on the same road. Some men have 
doubts, others think they have, but 
they are really nothing more than men- 
tal exhalations befogging common sense. 
The large majority of doubts have their 
origin not in plainly visible contradic- 
tions in the moral or physical universe, 
but in the ignorance of the doubter. 
Suppose our knowledge were perfect, or 
suppose our knowledge of nature and of 
God was as superior to our present high- 
est knowledge as this is to the knowledge 
and understanding of the lowest savage 
in Australian Bush who can not count 
beyond the fingers on one hand, how 
many insuperable doubts would remain 
to worry the candid thinker? Time 
makes man ashamed of his doubts. 

59 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

That all doubts are easily disposed 
of, however, may be a very blustering 
conviction of him who is indifferent to 
either truth or untruth so long as his 
physical needs are supplied. They may 
be all moonshine also to him who never 
knew enough to have a doubt. But how- 
ever enormous our doubt may be, there 
was never yet a doubt that behind it 
there was not a doubt that the doubt was 
nothing but a doubt; a creepy feeling 
that when the clouds have rolled away 
the mountain may be still there! In 
the Hibbert Journal recently (January, 
191 1 ) a writer says "even the hard- 
shelled skeptics are beginning to look 
wistfully for some spiritual solidarity 
and long for that peace which they sus- 
pect may still be burning quietly like a 
sanctuary lamp within the hush and dim- 
ness of the Church." To-day a black 
storm-cloud rose with threatening aspect 
in the sky. It broke in the middle ; be- 
60 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

tween the two halves there burst through 
the crimson glory of sunset. Clouds ob- 
scure, they also break away. 

Worse than mental troubles of this 
sort, which one may perhaps reason him- 
self out of, or have them knocked out 
of him by wider knowledge and expe- 
rience, is the growing consciousness of 
life's failure to achieve what might have 
been accomplished under other condi- 
tions, or of the utter vanity of self- 
denial for the attainment of any good. 
"What's the use?" is the saddest sigh 
a man ever breathes. Nothing so fa- 
tally cuts the nerve of finest endeavor as 
discouragement. Here is where a losing 
battle for one's very self is often fought 
by superior men. Such men are some- 
times beaten down by grosser natures, 
ruthless creatures, Goths and Vandals, 
who scorn the finer things of life. 
Sometimes they become the victims of 
envy and jealousy and smiling treachery 
61 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

because of that superiority, which, in- 
stead of being an inspiration to others, 
becomes the very reason why they should 
be isolated from the pack and devoured. 
I am reminded here of one of Maxim 
Gorki's stories. A man caught a vision 
of better things and endeavored to 
arouse his fellows to their realization. 
He argued with them, pleaded with 
them, showed them the way out of their 
grossness and ignorance and all the de- 
basement of their sordid surroundings. 
They laughed at him, and when he per- 
sisted they became resentful. Finally, 
he saw little groups of them whispering 
to each other. They were debating 
whether he was a maniac or a nuisance, 
in either case an individual to be sup- 
pressed or confined. The poor man, 
overwhelmed with his terrible sense of 
failure, rushes down a street and dashes 
his brains out against a stone wall at 
the end of it. Tennyson has sharp 
62 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

words for those mediocrities who, being 
themselves on a low level, would level 
the mountain to the plain. The moun- 
tain is a standing grievance to the plain. 
Surrounded by stupidity against which, 
as Schiller in his "Jungfrau" tells us, 
the gods themselves are powerless 
("Mit der Dummheit kdmpfen Gotter 
selbst vergebens." ) what encourage- 
ment is there for even the strong swim- 
mer to go against the stream? Why 
not go with the crowd and be popular? 
Why not be a coward and call it pru- 
dence? John the Baptist lost his head 
for telling the truth ; why not keep yours 
and call it the conservatism of experi- 
ence? 

To look out upon the shell of mod- 
ern life with its tumultuous energies, its 
politics, its parliaments and conventions, 
industries and operations of capital belt- 
ing the globe, its science and knowledge, 
its struggle for wealth and power, one 

63 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

would hardly think that behind all this 
ceaseless activity in another world, the 
invisible world of mind and spirit of 
which this visible world is the reflection, 
there was any fierce battle going on at 
all. Everything seems to exert itself in 
this. But life's tragedies and life's vic- 
tories teach us better. The invisible is 
the real world. There is the battle- 
ground of the forces. Here we see the 
results of the invisible conflict, not at 
all the flash of steel or the deadly thrust. 
Every heart knows its own bitterness, 
though it fronts the world with a smil- 
ing face. To-day in wealth and honor, 
sought for and flattered, holding high 
head among respectabilities; to-morrow 
stripped of all he bargained his soul for, 
but clad instead in criminal garb and sit- 
ting alone in a felon's cell, is all we see 
of the man who has gone wrong. But, 
it is enough. The procession of dead 
souls, men and women, tells its own 

6 4 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

story. There was a battle — this is the 
result ! 

The result, heartening beyond meas- 
ure, is also seen in the triumphs of those 
who do not surrender to Diabolus. 
Not for all the kingdoms of the world 
will they fall down and worship him. 
In a moment, like a gleam of lightning 
across the night, the kindly light of God 
has flashed in their souls. They see the 
truth, and worse than death is the love 
of a lie. 

"Oh, we're sunk enough here. God knows! 

But not quite so sunk that moments, 
Sure though seldom, are denied us, 

When the spirit 's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones, 

And apprise it if pursuing 
Or the right way or the wrong way, 

To its triumph or undoing. 

"There are flashes struck from midnights, 
There are fire-flames noondays kindle, 
Whereby piled-up honors perish, 

Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
5 65 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

While just this or that poor impulse, 
Which for once had play unstifled, 

Seems the sole work of a lifetime 
That away the rest have trifled." 

— Browning in " Cristina" 

In "Ned Bratts" also, Browning tells 
of the struggle for a soul. Mr. John A. 
Hutton pictures it for us. It is Special 
Session in Bedford Courthouse. Cases 
are being disposed of. Prisoners are 
tried and sent to jail. Pleadings are be- 
ing heard when suddenly into the midst 
of judges and lawyers and assembled 
people Ned Bratts and his wife clinging 
close to each other break in, and facing 
the whole court plead in God's name — 
to be allowed to speak. Their story is 
staggering. They had just come from 
Bedford Jail, where they had been im- 
prisoned with John Bunyan. Aban- 
doned criminals from early life, they 
had blasphemed and scorned the good 
man's pleadings. But Bunyan had read 
to them from "the blessed book" of the 
66 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

bottomless love and mercy of God, of 
the pity of Christ for poor sinners, of 
the infinite joy of forgiveness, of cleans- 
ing of soul, and of heaven. They had 
never heard of it all before, nor had 
they dreamed that the compassion of 
God was for such as they. And now 
they feel that they must go down into 
the blackness of their sinful lives and 
bring up into the light of day all the 
frightful iniquities of the years that God 
in mercy might destroy those iniquities 
forever. There they stood, those two, 
once hardened criminals, now fearlessly 
yet sorrowfully confessing their sins. 
Not one foul blot is left hidden, not one 
crime is forgotten. They tell it all. 
Each helps the other to remember what 
might otherwise be forgotten, feeling, 
as they tell it all, the burden on their 
souls slipping away from them. The 
blackness of their night rolls up like a 
scroll as they repent before God and 

6 7 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

man in the courthouse there. At last 
the horrible story of sin and crime is 
finished; and now, their faces wet with 
tears but illumined with a strange light, 
they beseech the judges on the bench to 
condemn them quickly to death. This is 
the only way they can expiate the past. 
They are willing to die. They are not 
afraid of the darkness beyond; they 
have passed through the darkness here. 
They are executed, and that speedily. 
But Ned Bratts and his wife fought for 
their souls and — won! 

In many other places Browning shows 
us the struggle of the soul, its victory 
and its defeat, as in "Pippa Passes," 
"The Ring and the Book," "Soul's 
Tragedy," and "The Lost Leader." 

In Victor Hugo's masterpiece, "Jean 
Valjean," we also see the sublime maj- 
esty of conscience, the struggle of a 
mighty soul to do right in spite of all 
that earth or hell can do against him. 
68 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

Valjean is an escaped convict. Some 
years ago he stole two loaves of bread 
for starving children and was sent to 
the galleys. There, herding with crim- 
inals of basest breed and suffering all 
the hardships and cruelty of the most 
savage character, his moral nature be- 
comes so brutalized that almost every 
feeling of pity or sense of wrong is ob- 
literated in him. The great deeps of 
his soul, however, are partly broken up 
by the kindness of the good Bishop who 
gave him food and shelter when hiding 
from justice, and after various relapses, 
the awakened soul of him not yet hav- 
ing recovered its strength, he resolves to 
tread the white way of integrity and 
honor. He assumes another name, M. 
Madeleine. By inventive genius and in- 
dustry he rises to prominence and im- 
portance. His name and his influence 
become known everywhere to officials 
and judges and honorable men, and he 

6 9 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

is respected for his sterling character. 
Factories spring up around him, and 
happy homes where the workmen live, 
and prosperous industries which bring 
comfort and plenty. He grows to 
wealth and increasing esteem, this M. 
Madeleine. He becomes Mayor of the 
town. Life full of satisfaction and dis- 
tinction stretches out before him. To 
live thus in quietness and ease, helpful 
to others and adored by all, is sweet. 

But the officers of the law are looking 
for Valjean, the dangerous criminal and 
escaped convict from Toulon. Per- 
sonal enmity adds zest to their zeal. 
Finally a poor, ignorant wheelwright is 
picked up in the road for some crime 
in the neighborhood and is brought by 
the gendarmes into court as the long- 
hunted Jean Valjean. Small prospect 
for the poor wheelwright ever enjoying 
another hour's freedom ! Never again 
will he wander away from the streets of 
70 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

Paris through country lanes and high- 
ways, the birds singing to him, talking 
at him, and expressing their opinion of 
him in their way, as he goes in search 
of work. The galleys or the gallows 
awaits him. M. Madeleine learns that 
this innocent man is to be tried for his 
life, perhaps, as the convict Valjean. 
Then the struggle begins. Valjean en- 
ters the wilderness. The past springs 
up, terrible in its meaning. It comes 
forth again like a ghost from its grave. 
He had long hated the name of Valjean. 
In hours of self-communion he had 
thought "that the day in which that 
name should re-appear would see vanish 
from about him his new life — and who 
knows, even perhaps, his new soul from 
within him." What should he do? 
Should he deliver himself to the police, 
or let this unfortunate go to the galleys 
or die, as the case may be? Terrible 
conflict! He is in torment. His brain 

7i 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

is in a whirl. The sweat rolled off his 
forehead. He argued with himself. 
He expostulated with himself. Why 
should he throw away the security, the 
honor and wealth that he had gained? 
Surely, it was the will of God, that now 
by the arrest of this unknown man the 
Valjean of other days should pass out 
forever and that he, M. the Mayor, 
should be free from discovery the re- 
mainder of his life. Yes, let things take 
their course ; this is wise ; this is prudent. 
It is a little hard, it must be confessed, 
on the innocent prisoner, but surely he 
is not responsible for the man's plight; 
he did n't accuse him, he did n't arrest 
him. He will therefore destroy all re- 
minders of the past, the Bishop's candle- 
stick, the forty-sou piece stolen from the 
little Savoyard, and enjoy the freedom 
and comfort God has given him. He 
will do all this. But he will not be able 
to do away with Conscience. Con- 
72 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

science is not dead. Louder than the 
thunders of Sinai the Voice thunders in 
his soul. What, then, will he do? De- 
nounce himself? Give himself up? 
Leave this goodly life, this room, these 
books, these honors, and liberty itself, 
for the chained-leg, the dungeon , the 
weariness and wretchedness and all the 
revolting horrors of the galleys? 
Dreadful thought? Dreadful alterna- 
tive, "To remain in Paradise and there 
become a demon ! To re-enter into hell 
and there become an angel!" 

And so the fight of the soul goes on. 
Now, he is driving the enemy, and again, 
he is beaten to the ground. At length 
with a mighty resolve he reaches the 
town of Arras and enters the room ad- 
joining the court where the prisoner is 
being tried. The arguments of the pros- 
ecutor are going hard against the unfor- 
tunate man at the bar. He can not ac- 
count for himself. Well-known officers 

73 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

who were once fellow-convicts in the 
galleys with Valjean identify him as that 
dangerous felon now acting a part. The 
prisoner himself is bewildered, dum- 
founded, and understands nothing at all 
of what this is all about, and so can not 
defend himself. This makes a bad im- 
pression on the judges. His own coun- 
sel has not been able to do much for 
him. The prison-doors are gaping for 
him! 

In the room yonder, whose door is 
shut, another tragedy is going on, a 
worse one. M. Madeleine is in there, 
his wilderness, fighting for his soul. 
For some time he has been there trying 
to consummate his resolves ; but the flesh 
is weak and he can not make the fatal 
plunge. "Well ! who is there to compel 
me?" Then he turned quickly, saw be- 
fore him the door by which he had en- 
tered, went to it, opened it, and went 
out. He ran terror-stricken from the 

74 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

conflict, from all the wretchedness that 
lay beyond. His soul is in agony. Will 
he surrender? It would be as if a tall 
tower had crumbled to its base, as if 
the dome of St. Peter's had fallen, 
crashing through the roof. He stops, 
leans against a wall to recover himself. 
He reflects. "He had reflected all 
night, he had reflected all day; he had 
heard but one voice within him, which 
said, 'Alas!' . . . Finally, he bowed 
his head, sighed with anguish, let his 
arms fall, and retraced his steps. . . . 
He entered the council chamber again. 
. . . Suddenly, without himself know- 
ing how, he found himself near the 
door; he seized the knob convulsively; 
the door opened. He was in the court- 
room. 

"I am Jean Valjean!" 

And with what loyalty to conscience 
does Scott in the trial of Eflie Deans 
show forth the fight of the soul in sister 

75 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Jeanie's martyrdom for Truth? Ar- 
thur Dinsdale in the "Scarlet Letter" 
is a conquered spirit, beaten and put to 
flight by the very demons, the demons 
of fear and shame, which heroic souls 
who "count not their lives dear unto 
themselves" scorn to parley with. This 
is the price of eternal life. "He that 
seeketh his life shall lose it, but he that 
loseth his life for My sake shall find it." 
Self-abandonment, self-destruction, then 
peace — peace rolling in from the Infinite 
like the waves of the boundless sea. 
Such is the experience of the twice-born 
souls who have met Diabolus in the wil- 
derness and laid him. Such was the joy 
of Caponsacchi in Browning's "Ring 
and the Book:" 

"In rushed new things, the old were rapt 

away; 
Alike abolished — the imprisonment 
Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the 

world 

76 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

That pulled me down. Death meant, to 

spurn the ground, 
Soar to the sky, — dfe well and you do that." 

Listen also to Carlyle in "Sartor Re- 
sartus:" "To me also was given, if not 
Victory yet the Consciousness of Battle, 
and the resolve to persevere therein 
while life or faculty is left. To me 
also, entangled in the enchanted forests, 
demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of 
sound, it was given, after weariest wan- 
derings, to work out my way into the 
higher sunlit slopes — of that mountain 
which has no summit, or whose summit 
is in Heaven only! n 

'T is a far cry from Carlyle to St. 
Augustine, but hear him in his "Con- 
fessions." Deploring former days, he 
cries out to God: "Too late I loved 
Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, 
yet ever new ! too late I loved Thee ! 
And behold, Thou wert within, and I 
abroad, and there I searched for Thee ! 

77 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

plunging deformed amid those fair 
forms which Thou hadst made. Thou 
wert with me, but I was not with Thee. 
Things held me far from Thee which, 
unless they were in Thee were not at 
all. Thou didst call and shout and 
burst my deafness. Thou didst flash, 
shine, and scatter my blindness. . . . 
Thou didst touch me, and I am on fire 
for Thy peace." 

Is all this too violent for modern 
Christians of the velvet cushion type? 
Time was when earnest men discounted 
any pretension to the God-life that was 
not born of fierce conflict with the pow- 
ers of darkness. Now, in some quar- 
ters, they are tired, or opposed to fight- 
ing and to marked conversions. They 
seek the easier way. Psychology is sub- 
stituted for Theology and the New Tes- 
tament. Education and religious prac- 
tices will do the work that once was 
done by the aid of the Spirit in the 

7 8 • 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

fight of the soul. But to all this a 
Paul and a Wesley, a Jonathan Ed- 
wards, a Valjean, or a Mary Voce, in 
"Adam Bede," who has fought her way 
through with the prayers of Dinah 
Morris, would say: 

". . . Call yourselves, if the calling please 

you, 
Christians — abhor the deist's pravity — 
Go on, you shall no more move my gravity 
Than, when I see boys ride a cockhorse, 
I find it in my heart to embarrass them 
By hinting that their stick 's a mockhorse 
And they really carry what they say carries 

them." 

Real men who know the world and 
themselves laugh at the "Ride-a-cock- 
horse-to-Banbury-Cross" method of re- 
demption. 

"A spotless child sleeps on the flowery moss, 
'T is well for him — but when a guilty man, 
Envying such slumber, may desire to put 
His guilt away — can he return to rest 

79 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

At once by lying there? Our sires knew well 
The fitting way for such: dark cells, dim 

lamps, 
A stony floor one may writhe on like a worm, 
No mossy pillow blue with violets." 

The sure result of victory in our wil- 
derness is — power. "Jesus returned in 
the power of the Spirit into Galilee; 
and there went a fame of Him through 
all the regions round about." Jacob 
wins at the brook Jabbok and is no more 
Jacob, but Israel: "For as a prince hast 
thou power with God and with men, 
and hast prevailed." The forces that 
would destroy us become the very means 
by which we gain strength: "Out of the 
eater came forth meat, and out of the 
strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 
14: 14). It is the Law of Increase. 
"To him that hath it shall be given, and 
he shall have abundance; but from him 
that hath not shall be taken away even 
that which he hath." 
80 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

"When the fight begins within himself 

A man 's worth something. God stoops o'er 

his head, 
Satan looks up between his feet — both tug — 
He 's left, himself, l the middle ; the soul 

wakes 
And grows." 

One mighty, sustained effort of the will 
shatters all habits. Down deep into the 
very foundations of vital being goes the 
imperial mandate of the desperate will 
that will never surrender. It breaks up 
the old order. It is a French Revolu- 
tion, a Reign of Terror, at the center 
of life, when the old sins that held sway 
are brought up and guillotined. Win 
one battle worth while, and the rest be- 
comes easy, for it is a law of our men- 
tal and spiritual life that any act volun- 
tarily repeated induces an immediate 
tendency to its repetition. One set of 
acts are, thereby, substituted for an- 
other. We feel ourselves grow by the 
6 81 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

exercise of our wills. Hence, says he 
who fought the good fight of faith, 
"Exercise — gymnasticise — yourselves 
unto godliness." 

Then again, the beauty of it all is, the 
sympathy that is born in us for others 
by such experiences. It is said of Jesus, 
"In that He Himself hath suffered be- 
ing tempted, He is able to succor them 
that are tempted" (Heb. 3: 18). The 
best helpers of the poor are the poor. 
Sympathy makes kin. It begets confi- 
dence, and out of that grows courage 
and all the sweet fruit of helpfulness. 
But no one can suffer with another who 
has not himself suffered. It is because 
the poor know poverty that they are the 
best helpers of the poor. Jerry Mc- 
Aulay down in Water Street could do 
for the derelicts of New York what all 
the preachers in Christendom might fail 
to do. He had been through the wil- 
derness. He knew the shame and the 
82 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

foulness of sin, the failures of good res- 
olutions, what it was to be beaten again 
and again, only to triumph at last. A 
mighty love is born in the heart for 
humanity battling with its weaknesses, 
its inherited burdens, its aggravated sins, 
its hopes and fears. It is the human 
touch that touches the human. 

He who has suffered will not con- 
demn. We do not know how often, 
how fiercely, men have resisted and 
failed. We do not know how often they 
have triumphed over some throttling 
evil. What physical or moral impulse 
was born with them, what limitations 
shut them in. It is all unknown to us. 
"Hold your book in the other hand," 
said a professor to a student who stood 
up to read. The student went on read- 
ing, seemingly giving no heed. "Do 
you hear me, sir?" The student ceased 
reading, but holding the book as be- 
fore. "Sir!" shouted the exasperated 

83 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

professor. Then the student, his lips 
quivering, held up his other arm — a 
mere stump, from which the hand had 
been cut away. The class cried out, 
"Shame! Shame!" But the professor 
rushed to the boy, and falling down on 
his knees before him pleaded, "Will you 
ever be able to forgive me?" // we 
only knew! Little wonder is it that 
those who have suffered most do most 
for the rest of us. And he is likest 
God, likest Him who went up into the 
wilderness to be tempted, who stretches 
out the helping hand to discouraged men 
and women who amid terrible odds are 
fighting every day like grim death for 
the integrity of their souls. I know of 
nothing that can make one feel happier 
or more boy-like than helping a lame dog 
over a fence. There is One who does 
help, One who was Himself tempted, 
and is able to succor them that are 
tempted. 

8 4 



THE FIGHT OF THE SOUL 

He who did most, shall bear most, the strong- 
est shall stand the most weak. 

'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for ! 
my flesh, that I seek 

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O 
Saul, it shall be 

A Face like my face that receives thee, a 
Man like to me 

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever; a 
Hand like this hand 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! 
See the Christ Stand/ 



85 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

I can not do it alone, 

The waves run fast and high, 
And the fogs close chill around, 

And the light goes out in the sky ; 
But I know that we two 
Shall win in the end — 

Jesus and I. 

I can not row it myself, 
My boat on the raging sea; 

But beside me sits Another, 
Who pulls or steers with me; 

And I know that we two 

Shall come safe into port — 
His child and He. 

Coward and wayward and weak, 
I change with the changing sky. 

To-day so eager and brave, 
To-morrow not caring to try; 

But He never gives in, 

So we two shall win — 
Jesus and I. 

Strong and tender and true, 

Crucified once for me ! 
Never will He change I know, 

Whatever I may be! 
But all He says I must do, 

Ever from sin to keep free. 
We shall finish our course 
And reach home at least — 

His child and He. 

— The British Weekly. 

86 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging 
place.— /er. 9:2. 

It must have been an unwelcome change 
for Jeremiah from his quiet home at 
Anathoth to the bustling city of Jeru- 
salem and the palace of the king. He 
was not a stranger to the capital; he 
well knew its streets and walls and 
towers, for he had lived all his life 
within six miles of it. But he was 
country-bred and was a stranger to the 
hidden life of the city, which was known 
only to the politicians and hangers-on at 
court, who fattened on its vices. He 
was out of place there, as such men al- 
ways are, and there was sure to be 
trouble. Kings' palaces are not good 

8 9 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

for prophets. Some men fit anywhere 
and at all times. That is their business. 
It is no inconvenience for them to run 
with the hare and to play with the 
hounds. But earnest men who really 
believe in God are always trouble- 
makers to wrong-doers. 

Around the throne of the Shadow- 
King who was permitted to rule stood 
wily counselors, worldly preachers with 
perennial smiles and deferential spine, 
false prophets, bolder than their lesser 
brethren of the willowy back, who 
prophesied in the name of Jehovah what 
was needed to strengthen the counsels of 
lying statesmen. From the courts of the 
Temple the curling smoke of sacrifice 
rose regularly. The solemn processions 
of white-robed priests and chanting Le- 
vite, clouds of fragrant incense, the 
pomp and splendor of ritual, the prayers 
of thousands of people rising and fall- 
ing with the fervor of devotion like the 
90 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

sounds of many waters, — all seemed to 
suggest that Jehovah was again the God 
of Israel. But it was only in seeming. 
At heart the nation was morally bank- 
rupt, and its doom was approaching like 
a black whirlwind on the horizon. 

At this juncture stood up the prophet 
Jeremiah. He was a seer who saw the 
sure results of the workings of eternal 
law. He was also a poet with a heart 
as tender as woman's love. But he was 
no weakling. We think of him as the 
weeping prophet, soft and lacking in 
fiber. But that is because of our wrong 
estimate of character. In spite of his 
tears and threnodies which sadden us 
like the low moanings of the sea, he was 
a born hero. In its darkest hour he 
never despaired of his country, nor of 
the ultimate triumph of righteousness. 

The religious man is the only true 
optimist. There are those, of course, 
who think they are officially appointed 

9i 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

dispensers of sunshine, but they live in 
a fool's paradise. Others there are who 
ignore the real situation, or, they are pro- 
fessionals, hired to laugh, as in the days 
of our Lord there were those who were 
hired to weep. They never oppose any- 
thing, they smile or look solemn in mar- 
velous wisdom and play their oracular 
part. But evil is here, nevertheless ; and 
there is no use in blinking at it. "I have 
investigated the dust heaps of human- 
ity," says Mr. Chesterton, "and found 
a treasure in all of them." He assumes 
that all we have to do is to think that 
the dust heap is a gold mine, and it be- 
comes one. But the City of the Dread- 
ful Night is not the City of God which 
dazzles us with its glory in the Apoca- 
lypse, and no mere thinking will ever 
make it so. Evil is here. Misery, 
wretchedness, the lying tongue, moral 
leprosy, and all the Protean forms of 
dirty sin which defiles everything it 
92 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

touches, are all here doing their sad 
work. The devil is not dead. Mr. 
Chesterton in his happy-go-lucky view 
of the world thinks he is. "At the 
least," says Mr. Masterman, in pointing 
out the fallacy of Mr. Chesterton, u at 
the least, he would design to make the 
author of evil die of chagrin at persist- 
ent neglect, or perish from the repletion 
of persistent flattery. The scheme is 
attractive but delusive. That ancient 
strategist has seen so many Chestertons 
flare and fade that he is unlikely to be 
entrapped by such naive methods." 

But Jeremiah knew, as all who be- 
lieve in God know, that evil has no right 
to be here, and in the ultimate will not 
be here. The universe is against it and 
will yet get good rid of it, and for this 
reason Jeremiah fought it. We admire 
the heroism of the Roman who bought 
at full value the very field on which 
Hannibal was encamped with his army; 

93 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

but during the siege of Jerusalem Jere- 
miah was so confident that God would 
deliver his country, though defeated, 
from the yoke of Babylon, that he pur- 
chased a farm near the city from his 
uncle's son and took wise care to secure 
the title deeds. When the corrupt Ma- 
nasseh fell, Jeremiah swept the land in 
favor of religious reform. When false 
prophets sought to delude the nation, he 
denounced them and their political allies 
at Jerusalem. When conspiracies were 
hatched against him, he broke through 
all snares and appealed to the people to 
mend their ways and avert, if possible, 
the gathering of "those vultures which 
smell decaying empires from afar." He 
was a hero. 

But heroes are not gods. They are 
human, sometimes very human. They 
are of like passions with ourselves in 
their weaknesses and failures. Indeed, 
there are times when the strength of the 

94 



THE LURE OF THE OUIET 

strongest becomes as weak as water. 
The cedars of Lebanon bend to the 
storm. The forests of Carmel are 
shaken with the wind. No one is al- 
ways at his best. He would not be if 
he were. Life is a struggle either with 
itself or with its condition, and from 
many a brave soul cramped by opposi- 
tion or poverty, or misfortune, the cry 
goes up, with the Psalmist, "Thou hast 
shut me so I can not get out." 

To many life consists in being 
knocked down and picked up again. 
They seem to be the foot-balls of fate. 
Then again, the strain of living on high 
levels seems to be too much for the ma- 
jority of us. There are select spirits, 
indeed, who, like eagles, are at home 
only on the mountain tops. But the 
most of us live down here, and nerves 
are not steel cables. There is a pace 
that kills as surely as does the pace 
downward. We get tired of the fuss 

95 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

and feathers, of the dust and heat, the 
ceaseless toil, the humiliating drudgery 
of the common round, and in the face 
of all our endeavors to be philosophical 
and brave we long to flee away as a bird 
to the mountains. We want to get 
away from the crowd, from the jungle 
cries of struggle in the marts of trade, 
from the illusions of life, from the im- 
pudence of the self-advertiser, those pit- 
iable gluttons of the limelight, and from 
the newly arrived with their bold ag- 
gressiveness and incessant buzzing of 
"paltry aims that end with self" — from 
the inartistic materialism of mere shop 
— we want to get away from it all and 
rest ourselves in depths of green woods, 
in quiet noons and musical mornings, far 
remote from the vulgar glamour and 
jostle and barbaric tumult of the street! 
And it is quite natural that we should 
feel so. 

Yesterday Jeremiah fronted the royal 

9 6 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

court at Jerusalem. To the loud pre- 
tensions of false prophets he cried out 
with conscious superiority, "The prophet 
that hath a dream let him tell a dream, 
but he that hath My word let him 
preach My word, what is the chaff to 
the wheat, saith the Lord?" But to- 
day there is reaction. Broken and spent 
from his fruitless struggle with civic 
wrong, he longs to break away from it 
all, from all human relations, from poli- 
tics and prophesying, from the glitter 
and splendor of kingly courts, hypocri- 
sies and ritualisms and priestly intrigues 
— to get away from it all and rest him- 
self in the wilderness, where not a sound 
of human voice would mar his solitude 
or remind him of the wrongs and woes 
of his people. "O, that I had in the 
wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring 
men, that I might leave my people and 
go from them!" 

And, so it is. Yesterday, we were 
7 97 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

on Carmel, like Elijah, triumphing on 
the heights of spiritual power, or with 
unspeakable love gazing on the beauty 
of the Transfigured Christ, with the 
disciples on Tabor. To-day, we are 
with the bats and creeping things of the 
cave at Horeb, or sighing for a lodge 
in the far-away desert. The brightness 
of the morning has faded into the dull 
red glow of evening. Like a sudden 
apparition in the dark the seeming un- 
reality of all that we have done, or 
strive to do, startles us. The wear and 
tear of many yesterdays cry out in our 
jaded spirits, we are in the abyss and 
"All Thy billows have gone over me." 
Life's problems and our own little af- 
fairs grow no less for all our fretting 
and for all our efforts at world-mending. 
The birds hop on the leafy branches of 
the trees along the road as we carry 
our hopes to the grave and they sing on 
sweetly just the same. What does the 

9 8 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

storm care for the man in the boat, or 
for the boat? As Dolly in "Silas 
Marner" says: "Ah, it's like the night 
and the morning, and the sleeping and 
the waking, and the rain and the har- 
vest — one goes and the other comes, and 
we know nothing how or where. We 
may strive and scrat and fend, but it 's 
little we can do arter all — the big things 
come and go wi' no striving o' ourn — 
they do that they do." Then, our 
ideals are ever larger than our achieve- 
ments, and we never get to the top of 
the hill. In our broken condition, jaded 
and spent, there is for us no more in- 
spiration, great passion, or entrancing 
vision of moral beauty. "Oh, that I 
had the wings of a dove, then would I 
flee away and be at rest." 

Now, is there anything wrong or un- 
worthy in all this? Not if we are 
human. You are simply tired and in 
need of repairs — in need of re-charging 

99 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

your nerve batteries. You need other 
skies. Jesus knew the secret of effi- 
ciency, and to His disciples He said, 
"Come ye apart and rest awhile." 
Nerves are not cables. Every mount of 
triumph has its valley of humiliation. 
Was there ever a saint of God from 
Elijah to the last one yesterday who did 
not at some time or other lie under a 
juniper-tree ? Jeremiah longed for even 
a hut in the wilderness, that he might es- 
cape the strife of tongues and the chaos 
around him. John the Baptist becomes 
a broken victim of doubt when shut in 
within prison walls from far-circling 
horizons of the desert and measureless 
depths of blue in the uttermost sky. 
Didn't Paul have lurid mornings and 
distressing weariness betimes? Even 
Jesus himself had times of depression, 
immeasurably sad, lonely hours when 
He sought human sympathy, saying to 
His friends, "Now is My soul trou- 
ioo 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

bled." Life has its heights and also its 
depths. One is as useful as the other, 
and without both there would be neither. 
No, the sin of the juniper tree is not 
in being there, but in staying there. 
Anybody can be brave when there is no 
lion in the way, or smile broadly when 
fortune blossoms. But the test of a man 
is when he is down. The true man who 
has in him the stuff that saints are made 
of, will not stay down; he will rise 
again, will rise like a rubber ball — the 
harder it is knocked down the higher it 
springs. 

You are beaten to earth ? Well, well, what 's 
that? 
Come up with a smiling face. 
It 's nothing against you to fall down flat, 

But to lie there — that 's disgrace. 
The harder you 're thrown, why, the higher 
you bounce. 
Be proud of your blackened eye ! 
It is n't the fact that you 're licked that counts, 
It 's how did you fight — and why ? 
IOI 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Heaven has limited respect for him 
who runs away from the evil around 
him. His business is to fight it. A 
man's place is among men. Not in the 
wilderness, but in the city; not in the 
cave at Horeb hiding from Jezebel, but 
on Carmel slaying false prophets; not 
lost in the crowd, but stalwart in the 
arena, fighting with beasts at Ephesus. 
Over against the Lure of the Quiet, is 
the call of duty in the crowded haunts 
of men. Into the silence of Horeb 
comes the voice of God: "Elijah, what 
are you doing here?" 

The value of a man as a social being 
is his contribution to the happiness of 
society, his contribution to the solution 
of the Question before the House. We 
can not always have things as we would 
have them. Of course there are Chad- 
bands and Pecksniffs, but are there not 
also Dinah Morrisses and Cheeryble 
Brothers? As the author of Festus 
102 



THE LURE OF THE OUIET 

says, "There are thorns and nettles ev- 
erywhere, but the smooth green grass is 
more common still, and the blue of 
heaven is larger than the cloud." And 
even of the cloud, let us say with Ellen 
Thornycroft Fowler: 

The inner side of every Cloud 

Is bright and shining. 
I therefore turn my Clouds about 
And always wear them inside out, 

To show the lining. 

A man's place, then, is in the world. 
Just as you enter the Appian Way after 
passing the little Chapel of St. Sebastian 
on the left, beyond the Arch of Constan- 
tine, there is a church, a memorial, 
marking a sacred spot, one of the most 
sacred in the Eternal City. Around 
this hallowed ground Legend has woven 
its beautiful fancy. The story is that 
during the persecution under Nero, 
Peter's heart failed him and he deter- 
103 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

mined to flee from the city. Having 
eluded the spies and passed the gates, 
he was congratulating himself on his 
escape when, suddenly, on this spot he 
met Jesus bearing His cross. Aston- 
ished at the vision, he cried out, "Lord! 
where are You going?" (Domine, quo 
vadisf) and Jesus answered, "To 
Rome, to be crucified again" (Vado ad 
Romam iterum crucifigi). Ah, so it 
ever is! 

I said, "Let me walk in the fields;" 
He said, "Nay, walk in the town;" 

I said, "There are no flowers there!" 
He said, "No flowers, but a crown." 

I said, "But the sky is black, 

There is nothing but noise and din;" 

But He wept as He sent me back — 

"There is more," He said, "there is sin." 

I said, "But the air is thick, 

And fogs are veiling the sun;" 
He answered, "Yet hearts are sick, 

And souh in the dark undone." 
104 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

I said, "I shall miss the light, 

And friends will miss me, they say;" 

He answered me, "Choose to-night 
If I am to miss you, or they." 

I pleaded for time to be given; 

He said, "Is it hard to decide? 
It will not seem hard in heaven 

To have followed the steps of your Guide." 

I cast one look at the field 

Then set my face to the town; 
He said: "My child, do you yield? 

Will you leave the flowers for the crown?" 

Then into His hand went mine, 

And into my heart came He. 
And I walk in a light divine 

The path I had feared to see. 

— George Macdonald. 

But supose you were in the wilderness, 
what would you do with it or in it? We 
may escape the vulgarisms and annoy- 
ances of the dusty day, the fooleries of 
society, and the sordidness of the crowd, 
but we can not escape ourselves. Wher- 
105 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

ever we go, we go. The desert is the 
last place in the world where we may 
lose ourselves or find innocence and 
peace. He who thinks he can escape 
the evils of his day by flying from them 
to some imaginary "lodge in some vast 
wilderness, some boundless contiguity 
of shade," is like a philosophical Rus- 
sian who jumped into the sea to es- 
cape the storm. There are indeed 
contemplative spirits who are independ- 
ent of time and place — rare souls 
to whom the populous city may be a 
desert, and the silent wilderness no ne- 
cessity. John Henry Newman, when 
once found walking in a quadrangle at 
Oxford, was asked if he were alone, to 
which he instantly replied, "Never so 
little alone as when alone." Cicero had 
uttered the same thought when musing 
alone in his Roman villa. But for the 
average man the worst company he can 
have is himself. It is not good for man 
106 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

to be alone, says Holy Writ, and that 's 
the end of it. In the picture of St. An- 
thony in the Desert we see the holy man 
in his cave reading; but the cave is full 
of imps, little demons, one climbing on 
to his rock table, another perched on 
his shoulder peering into the open book, 
another looking into his water jar. Ah ! 
these evil thoughts, these longings for 
sins we dare not or can not commit, they 
are with us in the wilderness. For, 
while u the Kingdom of God is within 
you," so also is the kingdom of evil. 
No, the way to conquer evil is to face 
it, just as the way to escape the wrath 
of God is to fly to God. 

The way to Peace is the way of the 
Cross. Self-crucifixion is world-con- 
quest, and it is he only who has con- 
quered himself who can calmly stand at 
his post, — he only who has stood the 
test of defeat and knows the thorny road 
of grief is the real hero who has the 
107 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

respect and the admiration of God. 
Neither heaven nor earth has any shout- 
ings or palms for the chronic corn- 
plainer, not even for him whose strength 
in the day of adversity is small, but 
whose laughter is long and loud upon 
the hills when fortune smiles and the 
dread of yesterday is no more. 

It is easy enough to be pleasant 

When life flows by like a song, 
But the man worth while is one who will smile 

When everything goes wrong; 
For the test of the heart is trouble, 

And it always comes with the years; 
And the smile that is worth the praises of earth 

Is the smile that shines through tears. 

It is easy enough to be prudent 

When nothing tempts you to stray; 
When without or within no voice of sin 

Is luring your soul away. 
But it 's only a negative virtue 

Until it is tried by fire, 
And the life that is worth the honor of earth 

Is the one that resists desire. 
108 



THE LURE OF THE QUIET 

By the cynic, the sad, the fallen, 

Who had no strength for the strife, 
The world's highway is cumbered to-day — 

They make up the item of life; 
But the virtue that conquers passion, 

And the sorrow that hides in a smile, 
It is these that are worth the homage of earth, 

For we find them but once in a while. 
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 



109 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

And Jacob served seven years for Ra- 
chel and they seemed unto him but a few 
days for the love he had for her. 

— Gen. 29: 20. 

In the works of really great writers, 
such as Scott or Dickens, George Eliot, 
Tolstoi or Hugo, we come across pas- 
sages here and there of strange pathetic 
power, subtle touches of almost super- 
human genius which reach down to the 
depths of feeling and open at once the 
springs of emotion. We know that ac- 
cording to some canons we should not 
permit such excitation of feeling; but it 
is altogether useless for any human icicle 
to tell us that we should suppress such 
lawless impulses, for it is the business of 
Genius to see that no appeal to cold 
Reason shall be stronger than its appeal 
to the human heart. Since we are in the 

8 ii3 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

world we are in a way one with the 
world, flesh of its flesh, bone of its bone. 
The sorrows and the joys of the men 
and women who live and act, laugh or 
weep in the pages before us, weave 
about us their bewitching spells, and, in 
spite of all our philosophy or stolidity, 
as the case may be, we become sympa- 
thetic witnesses or partisan actors in 
what we read. Let us not forget that 
Kant, the greatest philosopher of Ger- 
many and the inaugurator of a new era 
in philosophy, omitted his daily walk to 
read "Uncle Tom's Cabin;" that Lord 
Palmerston, Prime Minister of England, 
read it three times; that Darwin, whom 
we picture as absorbed only in scientific 
contemplation of Protozoa and the An- 
thropoid Ape, immensely enjoyed sim- 
ple love stories; that the "Heir of Red- 
clyffe" brought tears to the eyes of G. 
J. Romanes, the hard-headed skeptical 
author of "A Candid Examination of 
114 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

Theism" and not the least in that bril- 
liant galaxy of scientists in England 
which adorned the latter part of the 
Nineteenth Century. If, however, you 
are incurably insensible to these weak- 
nesses, "and their comforts too," it is 
not because pachydermatous indifference 
to the finer feelings is an acquisition to 
be proud of, or a virtue to be cultivated, 
but because, probably, as Ben Winthrop 
says to the parish clerk, "It 's your in- 
sides as is n't right made for music, it 's 
no better nor a hollow stalk." Feeling 
is older than thought, and though we 
may be a very Gradgrind for hard facts, 
nevertheless stronger than any other 
passion, Sentiment, at last, rules the 
world. 

It is not an accident that in all the 
literature of humanity, rich as it is in 
the poetry of sentiment, there should be 
no book so full of emotion as the Bible. 
What wonderfully touching stories from 

"5 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Time's early dawn are told to us there 
of Joseph, and Samuel, and Ruth ! And 
to what glorious heights of sublimity 
are we carried by the sublimest passages 
in the Bible, Isaiah XL and LX, and 
chapters XXXVIII and XXXIX of 
Job ! The most perfect elegy in all lit- 
erature is David's Lament for Saul and 
Jonathan (2 Sam. 1:19-27), and the 
most transporting expression of triumph 
is the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 : 
2-31. But in this Book, so full of His- 
tory and Poetry and Drama, is there any 
literary gem more exquisitely lovely in 
its suggestiveness, more beautiful in its 
simplicity, than this little story of Ja- 
cob's love for his Rachel? The only 
jewel equal to it — perhaps superior to 
it, in a way — is the story of the birth 
of Jesus, as told by Luke. But if that 
is the Pearl of the New Testament, this 
is the Kohi-noor of the Old. It is be- 
yond the power of genius to improve 
116 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

upon it. "And Jacob served seven years 
for Rachel, and they seemed unto him 
but a few days for the love he had for 
her." 

The most beautiful star in the sky is 
the world we live on, and the dearest 
spot in the world is the place we call 
home. It matters not where it is, nor 
what it is; whether it is a tent under a 
palm-tree, a mansion in the midst of 
culture and art, an old house in a smoky 
town, or a log-cabin on a mountain-side 
neighboring tall trees and the lonely 
peaks that parley with the sun — it mat- 
ters not, for around no other spot do 
so many tender memories cluster, and 
to no other place does imagination re- 
turn as if to a lost Eden to find again 
the innocence and gladness that were 
once ours. For, if Paradise, as Augustus 
Hare wrote, was the home of our first 
parents, home is the Paradise of their 
descendants. 

117 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

One of the most delightful enjoy- 
ments possible in London is visiting the 
homes where great writers and men of 
history lived and wrote their works; 
No. 6 Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, 
where Goldsmith wrote his "Vicar of 
Wakefield;" — No. i Devonshire Ter- 
race, where Dickens wrote his "Cricket 
on the Hearth," "Barnaby Rudge" 
"The Curiosity Shop," "Dombey & 
Son;" — Tavistock House, in the square 
of that name, where he wrote "The Tale 
of Two Cities," "Little Dorrit," and 
portions of "Bleak House;" — No. 5 
Great Cheyne Row, where Carlyle 
wrote his "French Revolution;" — the 
homes of George Eliot, Robert Brown- 
ing, Thackeray, and the large house, 
now the wing of an Homeopathic hos- 
pital, at the corner of Great Ormond 
Street, near the British Museum, where 
Macaulay lived, and where he wrote his 
Essay on Milton. What times the Mac- 
118 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

aulay family had in that house! In 
1857, long after the great historian had 
become famous, he writes: 

"I sent the carriage home and walked 
to the Museum; passing through Great 
Ormond Street, I saw a bill on No. 50. 
I knocked, was let in, and went over the 
house with a strange mixture of feelings. 
It is more than twenty-six years since 
I was in it. The dining-room and the 
adjoining room in which I once slept 
are scarcely changed; the same coloring 
on the wall, but more dingy. My fa- 
ther's study much the same; the draw- 
ing-rooms too, except the papering; my 
bedroom just as it was. My mother's 
bedroom — I had never been in it since 
her death. I went away sad." 

Long after Disraeli had become 
Prime Minister of England he visited 
his old home in Bloomsbury Square, his 
personality not being known to the care- 
taker, where "He sat for some time pon- 
119 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

dering and reflecting." Visiting one day 
the rooms in Kensington Palace where 
Queen Victoria was born, and where she 
played with her dolls and toys which are 
all there yet, an attendant told me that 
on the occasion of the Queen's last visit 
there, being too old and feeble to climb 
the stairs, she had herself carried up in 
a rolling chair to the room where in 
the long, long ago she played as a child. 
Thus does the home hold us to the end ! 
And yet it is not the house that makes 
the home, but the presence of her whose 
mother-love, like God's arms, shelters 
all who are there. Somewhere Ruskin 
says of the true woman that "There may 
be no roof above her but the stars; no 
light to cheer her but the glow of the 
fire-fly in the wet grass at her feet; but, 
wherever she is, there is home." Should 
she pass away there may be a house left, 
but not a home. The soul of it has 
gone out of it and left a void that star- 
120 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

ties, an emptiness that fills the bereaved 
heart with a loneliness longing from 
which there is no escape. It is not home 
any more. She is gone. 

Should the father die, bad as that 
may be, the mother will still be the rally- 
ing center for her stricken brood; she 
will pick up the wrecks of her broken 
home, gather her children about her 
"as a hen gathereth her chickens under 
her wings," and manage in spite of 
death to get along somehow. As only a 
woman can she will manage without her 
little ones knowing or sharing her heart- 
aches and privations, to make for them 
a home — one green little spot in the 
desert — where love shall brood over 
them and, like the wings of God, keep 
them from the evil. "As a mother com- 
forteth her children, so will I comfort 
you, saith the Lord," is the Divine rec- 
ognition of Itself in the heart of a 
woman. 

121 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

As God is heaven, woman is home. 
There is no heaven without Him, and 
there is no home without her. Gentle, 
and strongest when gentlest, self-sacri- 
ficing and patient, mindful of sweetest 
courtesies, expectant ever as her only re- 
ward of the caress of him she loves, or 
of the velvet hands of those who call 
her mother, she lives, and can only truly 
live, in a world of love. She, and not 
the Pope, is God's vicar on earth, for, 
as Carlyle says with largest meaning, 
"God made Mothers, and shall not all 
be well?" The Mother is the visible 
revelation of the Mother-Heart of God, 
which quality in Him is the secret of the 
love and beauty of the universe. Has 
not Wordsworth, the poet of Nature, 
drawn with insight as true as that spir- 
itual perception we feel in the lines on 
Tintern Abbey, the real woman, who is 
always half angel, half human? 

122 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

She was a Phantom of delight 

When first she gleamed upon my sight! 

A lovely Apparition, sent 

To be a moment's ornament! 

Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; 

Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; 

But all things else about her drawn 

From May-time and the cheerful Dawn! 

A dancing Shape, an Image gay, 

To haunt, to startle, and waylay! 

I saw her, upon nearer view, 

A Spirit, yet a Woman too! 

Her household motions light and free, 

And steps of virgin liberty; 

A countenance, in which did meet 

Sweet records, promises as sweet! 

A Creature not too bright, or good, 

For human nature's daily food! 

For transient sorrows, simple wiles, 

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles! 

And now I see, with eyes serene, 
The very pulse of the machine! 
A Being breathing thoughtful breath! 
A Traveler betwixt life and death! 
The reason firm, the temperate will, 
123 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; 
A perfect Woman, nobly planned 
To warn, to comfort, and command: 
And yet a Spirit still, and bright 
With something of an angel light! 

Such is the woman whom men rever- 
ence from afar and love when near, the 
mother of men. 

One's opinion of mankind is largely 
determined by the kind of mankind he 
lives with. Bernard Shaw insists that 
women lack intellect, which opinion does 
discredit to his Celtic blood and to the 
6,500 useful patents issued to women. 
Tolstoi thinks they lack spirituality. 
Schopenhauer, Heine, and Balzac think 
they are idealized and are not what men 
imagine them to be. 

Now, there is nothing gained by quar- 
reling with the fancies of novelists, 
dramatists, or literary decadents who 
misinterpret this world or create one of 
their own and people it with all sorts 
124 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

of creatures good, bad, and ridiculous. 
In his "My Confession" Tolstoi says, 
"I felt that I was not quite mentally 
sound" — as one might perhaps judge 
from his "Kreutzer Sonata" Balzac 
never painted the portrait of a good 
woman. Schopenhauer looked at cre- 
ation through smoked glasses, and poor 
Heine felt differently about women 
when rising from his "mattress grave" 
in the Rue d'Amsterdam, in Paris, when 
for the last time he sought the consola- 
tions of the Ideal in the Venus of the 
Louvre. "With difficulty," says he, "I 
dragged myself to the Louvre, and I al- 
most sank down as I entered the magnifi- 
cent hall where the ever-blessed goddess 
of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, 
stands on her pedestal. At her feet I 
lay long, and wept so bitterly that a 
stone must have pitied me. The god- 
dess looked compassionately on me, but 
?X the same time disconsolately, as if she 
125 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

would say, 'Dost thou not see, then, 
that I have no arms, and thus can not 
help thee ?' " Women there may be who 
have more of the sub-human than the 
super-human in their cosmos, just as 
there are men who, according to Web- 
ster's definition of "Model," may be 
nothing more than "an imitation of 
something existing," but real men know 
real women, and, after all, it is only the 
real that counts. 

Of course, we can hardly be expected 
to fall in love with such feminine types 
as Mrs. Gummidge, "that poor lorn 
creetur" to whom "everything goes 
contra iry;" Mrs. Jellaby, "who devotes 
herself to the public" and who is "hop- 
ing by this time next year to have from 
a hundred and fifty to two hundred 
healthy families cultivating coffee and 
educating the natives of Borrioboola- 
Gha, on the left bank of the Niger;" 
Miss Miggs of sharp and acid visage — 
126 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

Miss Miggs who, "as a general princi- 
ple and abstract proposition, held the 
male sex to be utterly contemptible and 
unworthy of notice; to be fickle, false, 
base, sottish, inclined to perjury and 
wholly undeserving." We can not, ab- 
solutely, worship such worthy women. 
Not even Mrs. Lupin, the good-looking, 
comfortable Mistress of the Blue Dra- 
gon — a fitting contrast to Balzac's Ma- 
dame Valquer, sitting, like a huge brown 
spider in its dusty cobweb, at the door 
of her Parisian den full of odors and 
mystery. 

Nor will any but decadents reverence 
as Sistine Madonnas those poor crea- 
tures, mere simulacras of women, found 
in the pages of a Herrick, a Zola, or a 
D'Annunzio, those diabolically sweet- 
toned, perfumed enchantresses who 
"weave the winding sheet of souls and 
lay them in the urn of everlasting death," 
neurasthenic victims of ennui ; silly, vain 
127 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

women, seekers of the other sex, desert- 
ers of home but frequenters of the ball- 
room; affectionate toward dogs but in- 
different to children, alluring in dress 
but strangers to taste. Such creatures, 
pitiable rather than condemnable, of 
whom we may read in the yellows and 
purples of erotic fiction or, perchance, 
may see flitting like moths around an 
arc-light in the glitter of artificial so- 
ciety, are not real women, they are not 
the women who build the homes of a 
stalwart nation, women who inspire real 
men to noble living and magnificent 
deeds. 

The true woman finds her deepest joy 
not in the glare of the lime-light, but in 
the gladness of her home; not in the se- 
ductive smiles of a burnt-out blase 
habitue of the ballroom, but in the love 
of her husband and the happiness of her 
children. The path from her door does 
not lead to the Divorce Court, but the 
128 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

Courts of Heaven. In her home, where 
she is Queen of heart and hearth, there 
is nothing to hide. No secret shame 
gnaws at the roots of her life, like the 
serpent in Scandinavian Saga, eating 
away the roots of Ygdrasil. No tu- 
multuous unrest, or wild longing for the 
intoxicating excitement of the crowd 
singing uproariously down the Calami- 
tous Way, or swept in the whirl of fren- 
zied pleasure, disturbs her unruffled 
peace. She is sane. She sails through 
life's seas on an even keel. The home 
may be humble and constant toil be 
needed for its support, yet repose is 
there; satisfaction is there; honor is 
there ; love is there ; radiant, comforting, 
glorifying, lifting even the earthy and 
common-place into the ideal and the 
heavenly. There, where she is more 
than Vestal Virgin guarding the sacred 
fire in Rome's most virile days, the an- 
cient pieties are reverenced, the finer en- 
9 129 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

thusiasms for the best and bravest are 
bred into the blood and tissue of her off- 
spring. 

Her children rise up, and call her blessed; 

Her husband also, and he praiseth her, saying, 

Many daughters have done worthily, 

But thou excellest them all. 

Grace is deceitful, and beauty is vain; 

But a woman that feareth 

Jehovah, she shall be praised. 

How beautifully Tennyson in the 
"Princess" rises up and blesses his 
Mother. 

"I love her, one 

Not learned, save in gracious household ways ; 
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants; 
No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt 
In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise. 
Interpreter between the gods and men, 
Who look'd all native to her place, and yet 
On tipetoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere 
Too gross to tread, and all male minds per- 
force 

130 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved, 
And girdled her with music. Happy he 
With such a mother! faith in womankind 
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things 

high 
Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall 
He shall not bind his soul with clay." 

Among the hidden beauties of this 
story of love is the eager yearning of 
Rachel to fill to the brim Jacob's cup 
of joy. Not all women are perfect, 
lacking nothing to the satisfying of 
ideals of beauty and culture and the de- 
sires of the heart. Not to all women 
comes "that motherhood which was 
God's primal plan," although, as Ella 
Wheeler Wilcox sings, 

All womenkind He meant to share its glories, 

He meant us all to nurse our babes to rest ; 

To croon them songs, and tell them sleepy 

stories, 
Else why the wonder of a woman's breast? 



131 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

It is one of those lovely tricks that na- 
ture some time plays, for where there is 
no imperfection there is no dependence. 
Though Rachel was "beautiful and well 
favored," she had her limitations. But 
this made no difference to Jacob. He 
loved her. He loved her all the more 
for that she needed his love all the more 
to make up for what was lacking to com- 
plete her happiness and his. Love sees 
no defects. If such exist, they are ar- 
tistic fictions, just as we talk of legal 
fictions, or, they are mere flaws in a 
diamond, happy blemishes whose quality 
of imperfection is transformed into posi- 
tive beauty by their heightening the ef- 
fect of the virtues and graces of the be- 
loved. The soul of genius which shone 
through the frail body of Elizabeth Bar- 
rett Browning, the sweetest songstress 
in all the sky, appealed all the more 
strongly to her robust lover, the virile, 
masterful Browning, who won her and 
132 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

carried her away to health and happi- 
ness in sunny Italy. And how that love 
glorified her limitations ! 

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed 

The fingers of this hand wherewith I write ; 

And ever since, it grew more clean and 

white. 

Slow to world-greetings, quick with its "Oh, 

list" 

When the angels speak. 

— Sonnets from the Portuguese. 

Thus it is where there are real men 
and women, and real love between them. 
There may be men who by reason of 
over-culture or some other fatality are 
able to see nothing but limitations; cer- 
tain cold intellectuals, perhaps, who see 
at once every microscopic flaw, and be- 
cause of this remain lonely strangers to 
all the warmth of woman's love, and all 
that it means to hear from one's own 
child the sweet words, "My father!" 

133 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Herbert Spencer tells us that George 
Eliot was the most admirable woman, 
mentally, he ever met. The "greatness 
of her intellect conjoined with her wom- 
anly qualities and manner" kept him by 
her side. They met and took walks to- 
gether in the terrace at Somerset House, 
"at that time as little invaded by visitors 
as by sounds." People drew their in- 
ferences. "There were reports that I 
was in love with her, and that we were 
about to be married. But neither of 
these reports was true." 

Of course not. The author of the 
Synthetic Philosophy , one of the great- 
est philosophic minds of this or of any 
age, was so fastidious and, as he himself 
confesses, "so prone to look for faults 
alike in the performances of others and 
in my own" that his mind became too 
keenly analytical for love to play any 
part in his cold life's history. Herbert 
Spencer admired George Eliot and is 

134 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

generous in his tribute to her wonderful 
abilities and beautiful self-depreciation, 
but he can not help telling us that "her 
head was larger than is usual in women. 
It had, moreover, a peculiarity distin- 
guishing it from most heads, whether 
feminine or masculine; namely, that its 
contour was very regular. Usually 
heads have here and there either flat 
places or slight hollows; but her head 
was everywhere convex." How did she 
think of him? for he was by no means 
striking or handsome. 

"My brightest spot," she writes, 
"next to my love for old friends, is the 
deliciously calm new friendship that 
Herbert Spencer gives me. We see each 
other every day, and have a delightful 
camaradie in everything. But for him 
my life would be desolate enough. 
What a wretched lot of old shriveled 
creatures we shall be by and by ! Never 
mind, the uglier we get in the eyes of 

135 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

others the lovelier we shall be to each 
other." 

The straight line is the beautiful line 
in Ethics, but the curved line is the beau- 
tiful line in Art, and so to the eyes of 
love there are no flats and hollows. 
They are all curves. Browning saw no 
limitations in his Elizabeth. They were 
there, for she was not beautiful. But 
he saw her, the pure, sweet spirit which 
looked up to him and leaned upon him 
for that love which was her life. 

Some time ago the world hung its 
head in shame for a man, who having 
become immensely rich and wishing, as 
the newspapers said, to shine in a so- 
ciety to which he did not belong by birth 
or education, discarded the wife of his 
youth. Through many years of poverty 
and hardship, working in the kitchen 
and at the washtub, she had helped him 
to climb into prominence by sacrificing 
herself. Now, faded and worn, and 
136 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

possessing none of those accomplish- 
ments necessary to cultured society, she 
is to be thrust aside ! It would be diffi- 
cult to imagine keener agony or more 
benumbing grief than that of the broken- 
hearted woman who sat that night 
watching the hands of the clock slowly 
turn to the hour of twelve, when he, 
forsaking her, took to himself another 
wife, and she, divorced, discarded, 
thrown aside like an old dish-rag, passed 
out of his life — once hers — forever! 
But if the world hung its head in shame 
for this wrong, it stood up straighter 
and grew an inch taller when it knew 
that a President of the United States 
would steal away from the Cabinet of 
a great nation or from the representa- 
tives of kings and emperors to minister 
to the slightest wish of the frail woman 
in an adjoining room, who called him 
"William." The greater the need the 
greater the love. 

137 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

The crowning worth of this story, 
however, is the lesson it has been telling 
ever since of the heartening power of 
love. There is no inspiration like the 
afflatus of love. Nothing so quickly 
transfigures human life. In his "Buch 
der Lieder" Heine suggests to us a poor 
poet, misshapen, broken and spent until 
the ideal of his love draws nigh, when 
he is at once transformed into strength 
and beauty. Nothing so strengthens 
courage, nothing so toughens endurance. 
"Jacob served seven years for Rachel, 
and they seemed unto him but a few 
days for the love he had for her." 
Therein is the beauty and the glory of 
service. It is not measured by time. 

O Love is weak 
Which counts the answers and the gains, 
Weighs all the losses and the pains, 
And eagerly each fond word drains 

A joy to seek. 

138 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

It hardly asks 
If it be loved at all; to take 
So barren seems, when it can make 
Such bliss, for the beloved's sake, 

Of bitter tasks. 

Jacob's slavery to Laban was to him 
the largest freedom, as service to God 
is the gladdest liberty. Jacob had some 
one to work for, some one to come home 
to when the day's work was done. 
From early morning till the slanting of 
the sun he led the flocks of Laban to 
pasture, watched over them, fought their 
enemies, rescued the lost; but to him 
all this hardship was sweet, for there 
was a great motive in his heart; the 
joy of showing his heart 's desire how 
he loved her. Labor is not drudgery 
any more. Filled with a great love 
which glorifies him, life has worth and 
meaning never felt before; and the life 
that had been without purpose took on 
dignity and character which nerved him 

139 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

later for the struggle in the darkness 
with the Unknown at the fords of Jor- 
dan. 

In traveling about Italy or France or 
Germany one picks up many a charming 
story and quaint legend of the old ca- 
thedrals, such as the Cathedral at 
Treves, at Bruges, at Cologne, the old 
shrine at Antwerp, or the Church of St. 
Maria Maggiore on the Esquilline in 
Rome, which, according to the legend, 
was built by order of the Virgin, who 
appeared to Pope Liberius and a rich 
patrician in a dream and commanded 
that they should build a church on the 
spot where on the following day 
(August 5th) they should find newly- 
fallen snow. But I think the most de- 
lightful story of all is that which gathers 
around the Cathedral at Tronjheim, 
Norway: "When the building had been 
covered in, an aged artist came and 
asked to be allowed to carve one of the 
140 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

blocks left for that purpose. Because of 
his years his request was declined, but 
he begged so hard, and he was an artist, 
that eventually the chief architect al- 
lotted him a block in a remote corner 
of the roof, where, in that high latitude, 
the sun can only strike upon it during six 
weeks in the midst of summer. In those 
weeks, however, artists from many lands 
may be seen copying the work he 
wrought. Thankfully the old man ac- 
cepted his task, climbed slowly up to his 
scaffold each morning, and retired early 
each afternoon. One day he did not 
come down as usual, and was found to 
be dead, with open eyes fixed on a face 
he had chiseled in the stone. It was 
the face of a woman, a woman he had 
loved in early life. She had loved him, 
but death had snatched her away, and 
he had cherished the fond image all 
these years. He knew himself to be a 
dying man, he knew also that his art 
141 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

would be buried with him in the grave; 
he was therefore resolved that the last 
work of his hand should be to carve the 
features of the woman so dear to his 
heart in speaking stone. When the at- 
tention of the chief architect had been 
called to the circumstance he gathered 
the other artists around him and said: 
'Gentlemen, do you see that face? That 
is the finest piece of work in this cathe- 
dral, and it is the work of love.' ' 

From all this we learn that at the 
heart of Life is motive. As the motive 
is, Life is. All great lives are the prod- 
ucts of great motive. This was the se- 
cret of Him "Who for the joy that was 
set before Him endured the cross, de- 
spising the shame and is set down at the 
right hand of the throne of God" (Heb. 
12:2). It was the secret of Gladstone. 
On his first visit to Rome, when he be- 
held St. Peter's there came into his heart 
a deep longing for the re-union of 
142 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

Christendom. "The figure of the 
Church rose before me as a teacher. I 
contemplated secular affairs," he says, 
"chiefly as a means of being useful in 
Church affairs." "And from the day 
that he had his dream of a Universal 
Visible Church," says Mr. Morley, 
amid "the sublime and somber anarchy 
of history he beheld the Church leading 
the world." "This is the enigma, and 
this is the solution in faith, and spirit, 
in which Gladstone lived and moved. 
In him it gave energies of life their 
meaning, and to duty its foundation." 
It was the secret of St. Paul, "This one 
thing I do," of Gothe, of Bismarck, of 
Disraeli, of Livingstone, of Agassiz, 
and Darwin, and of every one, known or 
unknown, who has lived the life worth 
living. The lack of motive — ennobling 
motive — lies at the heart of the wrecked 
lives, the human derelicts which make 
up the flotsam and jetsam of humanity. 

H3 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

"Whatever lacks Purpose is evil ; a pool with- 
out pebbles breeds slime. 

Not any one step hath Chance fashioned on 
the infinite stairway of time. 

Not ever came Good without labor, in Toil 
or in Science or Art, 

It must be wrought out through the muscles, 
born out of the soul and the heart." 

What the listless millions, weary of 
life, need more than anything else is the 
power of a new inspiration. Grandeur, 
wealth, vast combinations of industry 
and commerce, freedom of thought, uni- 
versal education in material things, have 
not brought that happiness, that sweet 
contentment to the millionaire and the 
wage-earner that economists and soci- 
ologists have promised us from the 
housetops. These are not your gods, 
O Israel ! Bring back Imagination, 
bring back the hunger for the Beautiful 
in conduct, thought, and speech! Put 
an entrancing ideal into the soul of a 
144 



THE LOVE THAT ABIDES 

man, an angel dream in his brain, some- 
thing, anything, that will illuminate his 
inner being and light up the world in 
which he labors ; then will he be happier 
than kings and hardest toil will be 
sweetest joy. 

He whose life is centered in his home, 
who carries in his heart as he goes to 
his work the face of his Rachel and the 
laughter of his children will under- 
stand, as can not otherwise be under- 
stood, the fullness and the glory of the 
words, "And they seemed unto him but 
a few days for the love he had for her." 

Epilogue. 
"And Rachel died, and was buried in the 
way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem." 



J-45 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

'Since she went — home- — 
The saddened world has never seemed so 

bright ; 
There is less splendor in the morning's light 
And duller now the radiant moonbeams 
shine. 
All nature's joys come now to slower birth, 
And thou hast lost, O tender morning earth, 
The glory that was thine! 

'Since she went — home — 
The dragging days seem now so drear and 

long; 
A hint of sadness chills the gayest song, 

A plaintive tone in every sound I hear. 
Even the sunlight's rays of purest gold, 
Like all the world, seem something dull 
and cold, 
Missing her presence dear. 

'Since she went — home — 
So large a world to lose so very much, 
In one small woman's face and voice and 
touch, 
The simple magic of her tender smile! 
So full a world to have so empty grown 
For one small woman's quiet soul and tone, 
And yet — 'twill empty be for such a 
while 

Since she went — home!" 

— Ethel Maude Cols on. 

146 



THE EMPTY CRIB 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

And the streets of the city shall be full 
of boys and girls, playing in the streets 
thereof.— Zech. 8:5. 

Love is the deepest passion. It is the 
divinest quality. Soaring, singing, re- 
joicing, it is forever young, forever re- 
newing itself out of the boundless seas 
of Infinite Love flowing from the essence 
of God. It is the reason for Creation. 
It is the impelling cause of Redemption. 
Creation begins with its music, and Re- 
demption closes with its triumph. Like 
the warmth of suns it permeates all 
worlds. Even where there is no life it 
gambols and disports itself in infinite 
variety of form and lines of Beauty. 
Love is everywhere, for God is every- 
where, and God is love. 
149 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

But nowhere does this supreme qual- 
ity manifest itself so strongly, so beauti- 
fully tender, gentle and sweet, as in the 
heart of a mother, whether that mother 
be a brooding dove or a fresh young 
wife bending in ecstasy of wonder and 
delight over her first-born child. There, 
in the soul of the mother, God reveals 
Himself as He did between Angels' 
Wings on the Mercy Seat, for there is a 
light and a depth of glory not seen else- 
where on earth or sea or sky. It is re- 
markable how often He appeals to that 
Mother-love, which in a measure we un- 
derstand, to teach us the Love "that 
passeth knowledge." The only time 
God sings in the Bible is where in Zeph- 
aniah 3: 17, He assumes the character 
of a mother who presses her baby to 
her bosom and croons and sings over it 
with gladness and joy. Father's love 
is strong, lacking perhaps the exquisite 
fineness, the subtle poetry of love, but it 
150 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

is deep like the ocean, self-sacrificing to 
the uttermost, as is mother's love; and 
so, there is no love like parental love, 
ever revealing itself, offering itself, ex- 
erting itself, and finding its own un- 
speakable reward in smiling at its own 
reflection in the hearts of its loved ones. 
But what when this love is stricken, 
when it bends with fathomless grief over 
an empty crib! "Rachel is mourning 
for her children and will not be com- 
forted, because they are not." Yester- 
day the world was filled with music. 
Life was full to the brim. The voice 
of the little one and the patter of his 
feet made melody in the home. Where 
he was the atmosphere breathed love and 
all the sweet intimacies and mysteries of 
the Love-Life. Now, the whole world 
is changed. The green trees waving 
their branches to the passing clouds, the 
gentle bravery of color on the hillsides, 
the querulous monologue of the brook 

151 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

rippling over the stones where he played, 
the singing of birds, or the whispering 
of the winds in the treetops,- — these 
have no meaning any more, the whole 
wide pitiless sweep of Creation is noth- 
ing but a cruel, meaningless Blank, and 
we wonder how anything can sing in a 
Universe like this ! The light of the 
parents' eyes, the living embodiment of 
their mutual love is nothing now but a 
"white silence." Love hovers over the 
cold, unresponsive form which no kiss 
will ever waken; memory recalls every 
print of his fingers on the window-pane, 
every print of his shoe in the garden, his 
walk, his merry laugh, his soft touch, 
his eyes full of mirth and mischief, and 
all the pretty ways of him, now gone, 
leaving only an abyssmal void, a bound- 
less yearning for one more embrace of 
the little one that Love in its grief will 
not surrender. 

152 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

I wonder so that mothers ever fret 

At little children clinging to their gown, 
Or that the footprints when the days are wet 

Are ever black enough to make them frown. 
If I could find a little muddy boot, 

Or cap, or jacket, on my chamber floor; 
If I could kiss a rosy, restless foot, 

And hear its patter in my home once more ; 

If I could mend a broken cart to-day, 

To-morrow make a kite to reach the sky — 
There is no woman in God's world could say 

She was more blissfully content than I. 
But, ah! the dainty pillow next my own 

Is never rumpled by a shining head; 
My singing birdling from its nest has flown, 

The little boy I used to kiss is dead! 

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 

It was a long time ago, perhaps, since 
he went away — but the scar remains of 
the deep wound made that day. Not 
one of his little garments has been de- 
stroyed; they are upstairs, folded away 
in a safe place all these years, and his 
playthings are there too — always going 

153 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

to be done away with or disposed of in 
some way, but never yet has the day 
come. They stay as memory stays. 

The little toy dog is covered with dust, 

But sturdy and stanch he stands; 
And the little toy soldier is red with rust, 

And his musket molds in his hands. 
Time was when the little toy dog was new, 

And the soldier was passing fair; 
And that was the time when our Little Boy 
Blue 

Kissed them and put them there. 

"Now, do n't you go till I come," he said, 

"And don't you make any noise!" 
So, toddling off to his trundle bed, 

He dreamt of the pretty toys; 
And as he was dreaming an angel song 

Awakened our Little Boy Blue — 
Oh! the years are many, the years are long, 

But the little toy friends are true. 

Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand, 

Each in the same old place, 
Awaiting the touch of a little hand, 

The smile of a little face; 

154 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

And they wonder, as waiting the long years 
through 
In the dust of that little chair, 
What has become of our Little Boy Blue 
Since he kissed them and put them there. 
— Eugene Field. 

At such times, crucial days in one's 
life, there is apt to arise within us a 
feeling of resentment against God and 
the whole order of things. We enter 
the cloud. We sink into brooding and 
mystery, into doubt and unfaith. Does 
God know? Why did He permit it? 
Of what value was prayer? Does my 
little child live, and where is he, and 
what is he doing? Has he forgotten 
me ? And imagination wanders into the 
Unseen. All too well do we understand 
the heart of the great London minister 
Dr. Joseph Parker longing for a glimpse 
of the little one gone! 

"Amid all the whirl and dizziness of 
life's tragedy, in which creation seems 

I5S 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

to be but one great cloud, I find myself 
suddenly brought to a sweet baby's 
grave. A gray old church, a gurgling 
stream, a far-spreading thorn tree on a 
green hillock, and a grave on the sunny 
southerly side. That is it. Thither I 
hasten night and day, and in patting the 
soft grass I feel as if conveying some 
sense of love to the little sleeper far 
down. Do not reason with me about it; 
let the wild heart, in its sweet delirium 
of love, have all its own way. 

"Baby was but two years old when, 
like a dewdrop, he went up to the warm 
sun, yet he left my heart as I have seen 
ground left out of which a storm had 
torn a great tree. We talk about the 
influence of great thinkers, great speak- 
ers, and great writers; but what about 
the little infant's power? Oh, child of 
my heart, no poet has been so poetical, 
no soldier so victorious, no benefactor 
so kind, as thy tiny, unconscious self. I 

i S 6 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

feel thy soft kiss on my withered lips 
just now, and would give all I have for 
one look of thy dreamy eyes. But I 
can not have it. 

"Yet God is love. Not dark doubt, 
not staggering argument, not subtle 
sophism, but child-death, especially 
where there is but one, makes me won- 
der and makes me cry in pain. Baby! 
baby! I could begin the world again 
without a loaf or a friend if I had but 
thee ; such a beginning, with all its hard- 
ships, would be welcome misery. I do 
not wonder that the grass is green and 
soft that covers that little grave, and 
that the summer birds sing their ten- 
derest notes as they sit on the branches 
of that old hawthorn tree. 

"My God! Father of mine, in the 
blue heaven, is not this the heaviest cross 
that can crush the weakness of man? 
Yet that green grave, not three feet 
long, is to me a great estate, making me 

157 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

rich, with wealth untold. I can pray 
there. There I meet the infant angels; 
there I see all the mothers whose spirits 
are above; and there my heart says 
strange things in strange words — Baby, 
I am coming, coming soon ! Do you 
know me? Do you see me? Do you 
look from sunny places down to this cold 
land of weariness? Oh, baby; sweet, 
sweet baby, I will try for your sake to 
be a better man ; I will be kind to other 
little babies and tell them your name, 
and sometimes let them play with your 
toys; but, Oh, baby, baby, my old heart 
sobs and breaks I" 

Now, Religion has no conflict with 
tears. This would be a poor world were 
there no pain in it. It is sometimes bet- 
ter to go to a funeral than to a banquet. 
There we touch Realities; at the festal 
board we may be playing with Illusions. 
Through tears we see deeper into the 
meaning of things about us, and farther 

i 5 8 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

into the mysteries of the heavens above 
us. Against Nature Religion wages no 
war. The natural and the spiritual are 
two halves of the universal whole. Any 
view of life which does not include both 
is neither. 

To mourn for our departed dead is 
not distrust of God. Jesus wept. And 
what a beautiful, though pathetic pic- 
ture is that incidentally sketched in the 
Acts of the Apostles, of Paul's farewell 
of his friends at Ephesus: "And when 
he had thus spoken, he kneeled down, 
and prayed with them all. And they 
all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck, 
and kissed him, sorrowing most of all 
for the words which he spake, that they 
should see his face no more." 

Paganism, old or new, may steel it- 
self against the sorrows of life, thinking 
that they are of no concern to an in- 
different God. But Stoicism is at war 
with Nature and becomes callous to hu- 

159 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

manity, for that philosophy which looks 
with indifference on the evils of life will 
not disturb its unruffled calm with labo- 
rious efforts to relieve them. Religion 
presents to us the Man of Sorrows as 
the Ideal, and it is He, who is the true 
image of God, that reveals to us not 
the indifferent God — the God who-does- 
not care, but the loving Father who 
careth for us. 

And let us here think for a moment. 
If you had only one supreme wish for 
your child and you could obtain that 
without fail, what would it be ? Would 
it be wealth ? Riches take to themselves 
wings and fly away. Would it be honor 
and place and power? These are but 
for a day, and are often but sources of 
trouble within and envyings and bicker- 
ings without — degrading to noble spir- 
its. No. It is only when the earth is 
ours for the asking that we see how 
little it is. Every parent looking back 
1 60 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

over the road he has come would cry 
out: "After life's struggle give to my 
child eternal rest in Heaven. Give him 
immortal youth, number him with Thy 
Redeemed, the white-robed sons of God 
in the Land of the Unclouded Day." 
Well, if this is the hunger of us for our 
children's final welfare, should we weary 
the stars with our lamentations because 
God has given the child at the beginning 
of life what we wish for him at the end 
of his life? 

But Oh, the finality of it! This 
dreadful sense of loss, ever present, ever 
tugging at the soul, how can one ever 
be reconciled to it all! True, deeply 
true, because it is the revolt of Nature 
which shall some day itself be delivered 
from the bondage of corruption. It is 
Love crying out against Death. And 
we are not to be reconciled to Death. 
It is against Nature that we should be. 
And "the last enemy that shall be de- 

11 161 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

stroyed is Death." But to be reconciled 
to the purpose of God is quite another 
thing. Nevertheless, Heaven has made 
even Death to serve holy uses. The 
two great civilizers are Love and Grief. 
Love inspires, energizes, glorifies. Sor- 
row softens and refines. Love keeps the 
world young. Sorrow makes the whole 
world kin. The garden of Gethsemane 
leads to Mount Calvary, but over 
against Calvary is Mount Olivet and 
the Ascension path to the throne of 
God. And, after all, the going is not 
final, and the time may come when we 
shall be glad for that going. 

I once knew a mother who for long 
length of days mourned in secret for 
her little darling, a beautiful boy of five, 
and could not become reconciled to her 
loss, though she tried hard to think that 
it was all for the best. Many a time, 
long after he had gone, as she went 
about her duties in the home, did the 
162 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

silent tear course down her cheek, and 
when spoken to would say, "I wonder 
what he is doing to-day?" We all re- 
member when heart-broken Enoch Ar- 
den went back to his wretched hut to 
die, carrying his secret with him, how 
he fell back on the happy thought that 
the little one of the long ago would 
meet him at the gate of heaven. 

"And now there is but one of all my blood 
Who will embrace me in the world to be. 
This hair is his; she cut it off and gave it, 
And I have borne it all these years, 
And thought to bear it with me to my grave, 
But now my mind is changed, for I shall see 

him, 
My babe, in bliss." 

And so the time came, many years later, 
when this dear mother, going out her- 
self into the Unseen, turned back for a 
moment from the Shadows and with a 
smile said, U I am so glad he went; he 
will meet me there, and we will be to- 
gether forever!" 

163 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

But, after all, is it not true that much 
of our immoderate grief springs from 
our doubt of the Reality of God? Or, 
perhaps we think of God as foreign to 
us, and the Unseen as something to be 
dreaded. The Immensities appall us. 
We shrink into our quivering selves, 
feeling no oneness with the glorious 
Universe around us. We are strangers 
to it, as all our fathers were, and when 
Death robs us of our loved ones we 
think of them as lost, swallowed up in 
the infinite Nothing. And yet it is dif- 
ferent if we think of God as not out 
there among far-away stars, where no- 
body lives, but as down here where we 
live; as not being so much out there in 
the illimitable spaces where there are no 
bleeding hearts and grass-grown mounds 
where loved ones lie, as He is down 
here with us in our homes, in our joys 
and griefs and foolish stumblings. 

God is as much interested in our chil- 
164 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

dren as we are, and where they are, and 
what they are doing. There is no Here 
and There to him. It is all one. The 
whole is our Father's House. In that 
House there are many mansions, resting- 
places for growth and fitness, homes for 
spiritual nursing, homes for the worn 
and weary. 

And it is all one with those who go — 
only it is higher and more real and beau- 
tiful. So they are not lost, they are not 
absorbed in infinite emptiness. The soul 
there finds itself, realizes its own true 
self, and does not forget, and does not 
cease to love the dear faces wet with 
tears in yonder Earth-star. They know 
themselves as the children of this and 
that other sorrowful home, and the 
memory of it all, of father and mother, 
of brothers and sisters, of sunny days, 
of loving caresses and sweet nothings — 
or of hard toil and patient sacrifice, of 
poverty and hardship — stays. For, 

i6 5 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

were there no memory there would be 
no knowledge of one's self, and if no 
sense of identity, then no knowledge of 
life, or of death — nothing but a blank 
without a beginning, and all of God's 
providences from the cradle to the grave 
would be lost for the furnishing of the 
soul. 

The Good Shepherd careth for His 
sheep and carries the lambs in His 
bosom. "They shall hunger no more, 
nor thirst any more: neither shall the 
sun light on them, nor any heat, for the 
Lamb which is in the midst of the throne 
shall feed them, and shall lead them into 
living fountains of waters, and God 
shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes." Beyond the empty crib we may 
see the open door of heaven and u boys 
and girls playing in the streets thereof;" 
for — 



166 



THE EMPTY CRIB 

"Oh! what do you think the angels say?" 
Said the children up in heaven; 

"There 's a dear little girl coming home to- 
day; 

She 's almost ready to fly away 

From the earth we used to live in; 

Let 's go and open the gates of pearl, 

Open them wide for the new little girl," 
Said the children up in heaven. 

"God wanted her here, where His little ones 
meet," 

Said the children up in heaven; 
"She shall play with us in the golden street; 
She has grown too fair, she has grown too 
sweet 

For the earth we used to live in; 
She needed the sunshine, this dear little girl 
That gilds this side of the gates of pearl," 

Said the children up in heaven. 

"So the King called down from the angels' 
dome," 
Said the children up in heaven; 
" 'My little darling, arise and come 
To the place prepared in the Father's home, 

167 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

The home My children live in!' 
Let 's go and watch the gates of pearl, 
Ready to welcome the new little girl," 

Said the children up in heaven. 

"Far down on the earth, do you hear them 
weep ?" 

Said the children up in heaven; 
"For the dear little girl has gone asleep! 
The shadows fall and the night clouds sweep 

O'er the earth we used to live in; 
But we '11 go and open the gates of pearl ! 
Oh! why do they weep for their dear little 
girl?" 

Said the children up in heaven. 

"Fly with her quickly, Oh angels dear!" 
Said the children up in heaven; 

"See — she is coming! Look there! Look 
there ! 

At the jasper light on her sunny hair, 
Where the veiling clouds are riven!" 

Ah ! hush, hush, hush ! all the swift wings furl ! 

For the King Himself, at the gates of pearl, 

Is taking her hand, dear, tired little girl, 
And is leading her into heaven. 

168 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

I long to depart — to pull up anchor and 
sail away — and be with Christ, which is 
far better. — Ep. to the Philippians 1: 23. 

Paul is lonely. A prisoner on the Pala- 
tine Hill in Rome, he has had rough 
experiences lately — thrilling days and 
nights of preaching and prayer in the 
soldiers' barracks amid the comings and 
goings of guards and sentinels, the rat- 
tle of clanging shields and spears and 
breastplates thrown here or there, coarse 
jokes, soldier-talk and reminiscences of 
exploits in far-away battlefields by the 
Nile, the Euphrates, or the Danube, and 
it has all wearied him. But he has a 
little respite now, and with it comes a 
sagging of the spirit. He sits there at 
the door of the barracks overlooking the 
Circus Maximus weary and alone. The 
171 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

jostling crowds beneath him in the Cir- 
cus, with its vast expanse of seats rising 
tier above tier, its glorious columns, the 
glistening marbles of its temples, the 
lights and shadows on the Aventine Hill 
beyond, have no attractions for him. 
He looks upon it all, but sees nothing. 
His thoughts are in far-off Philippi, sol- 
acing himself with memories of friends 
in the little Christian community there. 
Soon, these vagrant longings wander 
away, as his loneliness deepens, to the 
truest friend of all, who is in Heaven, 
and then the sweeter side of the Apostle 
quietly comes to the fore, crowding out 
the ugly dreams that had worried him. 
Like a smiling violet beside a snowdrift, 
all that is beautiful and lovable in his 
virile yet sensitive soul gently reveals 
itself in this wonderfully tender, delight- 
fully courteous letter to his Philippian 
friends. 

Why Paul is heavy-hearted and why 
172 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

he longs so for the strengthening touch 
of friendship is made clear at the begin- 
ning of his Epistle. He had great times 
with the stalwart soldiers of the Praeto- 
rian Guard — some of whom, perhaps, 
were yesterday bodyguard to Nero — 
and to these bronzed empire-builders 
he, too, soldier-like, had spoken high 
thoughts of the Empire of the Spirit — 
of kingdoms and empires they had never 
dreamed of. But after that he had a 
bad hour meditating on another sort of 
people, certain babblers who had tried 
to depreciate him by minimizing him, 
disputing his doctrine, and making him, 
if possible, a perverter of truth; not di- 
rectly to be sure, which would fail; not 
openly, but by whispered suggestion, 
question, and innuendo. Experts these, 
fine experts in the gentle art of moral 
assassination, to worry a man like Paul ! 
But, the nobler the character the keener 
it suffers. 

173 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

No wonder the Apostle is weary of 
the strife. His thoughts are world- 
wide, but the littleness of things about 
him, the seemingly hopeless task of re- 
alizing his dreams at the heart of the 
Empire, his imprisonment, and his 
doubtful future weigh upon him. In- 
deed, as he sits there in his loneliness, 
thinking of his hardships and conflicts; 
of all that yet remains to be done in the 
Churches and the world outside; of the 
fathomless joy and blessedness of the 
Unseen, of the infinite possibilities of 
life there and fellowship with Jesus, a 
divine homesickness steals over him. 
He would, as of old, answer the trum- 
pet-call to duty, but he longs for rest, 
as men of God have often prayed, and 
in a moment of despondency he cries, 
"I long to pull up anchor and sail away 
to the Christ which is far better!" 

Brave soul, he has a tender side to 
him! He has often been the victim of 

174 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

mobs, and in many thrilling experiences 
on land and sea has frightened Death 
itself, but, after all, the vision of the 
end, the meeting with the Christ in eter- 
nal glory was the hope that lay hid down 
deep in his heart. To be with Christ 
was the dream of his life, the power 
which impelled him, the hope that in- 
spired him. 

And so do many cultured souls to- 
day ofttimes feel. They long to sail 
away. Not the world, but the littleness 
of it is too much for them. They hun- 
ger for love, for largeness of spirit, and 
the sweet serenity of peace. All beauti- 
ful souls long for quietness and the fel- 
lowship of the best. To the push and 
roar and stampede of the crowd they 
prefer the quiet woodlands, or the up- 
lands where there is sky and vision and 
creeping cloud, and where the trouble- 
some voices of the day are hushed in the 
silences of the stars. What would one 

175 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

not give to wander away into the green 
woods for a whole day with St. Paul, 
to sit for an hour with Plato, or with 
Seneca, as he writes his letters, or with 
Augustine, brooding over his "City of 
God," or to listen to the words of Jesus 
in the home at Bethany? Wonderful 
days for the soul when we sit and listen, 
all eyes and ears, to the kings of men, 
the great thinkers and prophets of hu- 
manity, and beholding the worlds of 
thought and Being expand before us, 
feel ourselves grow ! 

It takes a long time to get the world 
out of us and the universe into us. We 
are so provincial. Is there not some 
difference between fowls in a barnyard 
and eagles in the azure? Some differ- 
ence between finding one's world in the 
bottom of a well with three feet of sky 
above, and tenting among the clouds on 
mountain tops? The worst heresy is 
narrowness. There is a divine reason 
176 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

why the universe is not smaller. And 
never till we turn from the little and 
seek the large, drop the temporal and 
seize the eternal, can we realize the 
powers adapted to the eternal and the 
limitless that are wrapped up within us. 
The soul is built for the infinite, and in 
the infinite alone can it find itself. In 
our best moments we long instinctively 
for the Heavens and the companionship 
of the best. Do you not remember the 
words of Socrates to his friends on the 
day of his death, as recorded by Plato? 
At sunset, according to Athenian law, 
Socrates will drink the deadly hemlock 
juice, and so, looking forward to his 
meeting with noble spirits in the other 
world, he says: 

"If, my friends, I did not expect to 
go to a wise and good God, and to men 
who have died and are better than those 
whom I leave here, I should do wrong 
in not grieving at the prospect of death. 

177 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

But now be assured that I hope to go 
to good men, but this I am not entirely- 
certain of; but that I shall go to God, 
a Master wholly good, be assured, if 
I am certain on any subject, I am on 
this." 

Then think of what Cicero says in his 
treatise on Old Age in one of the 
most splendid passages in all Classical 
Literature: "O glorious day, when I 
shall go to that divine assembly and 
company of spirits, and when I shall 
depart out of this bustle, this sink of 
corruption; for I shall go not only to 
those great men of whom I have before 
spoken, but also to my dear Cato [his 
son], than whom there never was a bet- 
ter man, or one more excellent in filial 
affection, whose funeral rites were per- 
formed by me, when the contrary was 
natural, viz., that mine should be per- 
formed by him. His soul is not desir- 
ing me, but looking back on me, has de- 

i 7 8 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

parted into those regions where he saw 
that I myself must come; and I seem to 
bear firmly my affliction [viz., the loss 
of him], not because I do not grieve for 
it, but I comforted myself thinking that 
the separation and parting between us 
would not be for long duration." 

Does not this remind us of the writer 
of Hebrews 12: 22, and how the posi- 
tive affirmations of the New Testament 
answer the needs of the best in all ages : 
"But ye are come to Mount Zion, to the 
city of the living God, the heavenly Je- 
rusalem, to an innumerable company of 
angels, to the general assembly and 
Church of the first-born — to God the 
Judge of all, to the spirits of just men 
made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of 
the new covenant, and to the blood of 
sprinkling that speaketh better things 
than the blood of Abel.' , 

There are those perhaps who really 
think that it is a superior quality of piety 
179 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

to be absorbed in what they call "prac- 
tical religion" rather than to be medi- 
tating on the blessedness of Heaven. 
They are not thinking of Heaven, its 
holy joys, its fellowships with kingly 
souls, its glad meetings with loved ones 
gone, its splendors and glory beyond 
compare. They are not thinking even 
between times of these things. They 
tell us in finely balanced phrase that he 
serves God best who serves man best; 
that the cry of the human in festering 
slums of crowded cities should fill our 
ears rather than the songs of the re- 
deemed; that to right wrongs here is 
better than rejoicing over triumphs 
there. And, indeed, they may not be 
wholly wrong, though they seem to be 
taking sides with Martha chiding Mary. 
Christianity is not a sentimental dream. 
It is not a religion of silks and per- 
fumes; of ecstatic rapture over soaring 
music and glorious cathedrals, those an- 
1 80 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

gelic dreams chiseled in stone, nor of 
spiritual aloofness, or of sighing over 
the waywardness of the world. Chris- 
tianity is spiritual virility. It is hero- 
ical. In it is the rich red blood of en- 
deavor, the fine stroke of conquest over 
principalities and powers, earthly and 
unearthly, which war against men's 
souls. Oh, we need n't think that Chris- 
tianity is an anaemic something adapted 
to women, cowled monks, and lovers of 
fine art. The great crowd of heroes, 
champions of truth and freedom, and 
all of worth we enjoy to-day, smile at 
us from Roman amphitheaters and mar- 
tyrs' stakes, and dungeons and battle- 
fields, and turn away from us, when we 
think so, to others of larger brow. 

Certainly, there is much work to do 
in this every-day world of ours. But, 
may not one both work and pray? serve 
and listen too? Is he not, in truth, the 
best helper who does both? William 
181 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Canton in his legends of the olden time 
tells this beautiful story: 

"In the ancient days of faith the 
doors of the churches used to be opened 
with the first glimmer of the dawn in 
summer, and long before the moon had 
set in winter; and many a ditcher and 
woodcutter and ploughman on his way 
to work used to enter and say a short 
prayer before beginning the labor of the 
long day. 

"Now it happened that in Spain there 
was a farm laborer named Isidore, who 
went daily to his early prayer, whatever 
the weather might be. His fellow 
workmen were slothful and careless, and 
they gibed and jeered at his piety; but 
when they found that their mockery had 
no effect upon him, they spoke spitefully 
of him in the hearing of the master, and 
accused him of wasting in prayer the 
time which he should have given to his 
work. 

182 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

"When the farmer heard of this he 
was displeased, and he spoke to Isidore 
and bid him remember that true and 
faithful service was better than any 
prayer that could be uttered in words. 

" 'Master,' replied Isidore, 'what you 
say is true, but it is also true that no 
time is ever lost in prayer. Those who 
pray have God to work with them, and 
the ploughshare which He guides draws 
as goodly and fruitful a furrow as an- 
other.' 

"This the master could not deny, but 
he resolved to keep a watch on Isidore's 
comings and goings, and early on the 
morrow he went to the fields. 

"In the sharp air of the autumn morn- 
ing he saw this one and that one of the 
men sullenly following the plough be- 
hind the oxen, and taking little joy in the 
work. Then, as he passed on to the 
rising ground, he heard a lark caroling 
gayly in the gray sky, and in the hun- 

183 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

dred acre which Isidore was engaged 
he saw to his amazement not one plough 
but three turning the hoary stubble into 
ruddy furrows. 

"And one plough was drawn by oxen 
and guided by Isidore, but the two 
others were drawn and guided by angels 
of heaven. 

"When next the master spoke to Isi- 
dore it was not to reproach him, but to 
beg that he might be remembered in his 
prayers." 

It is a stern truth which we do well 
to grasp in its significance if we can, 
that, whether we mean to or not, we put 
ourselves into our work, of whatever 
kind it is. Of whatever quality, texture, 
or spirit we are, that will our work be. 
Carlyle somewhere says, "A false man 
can not build a straight wall." Nor can 
he. Give him time enough and wall 
enough, and he will build himself into 
the wall. The noblest and the most 
184 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

beautiful things of life in architecture, 
and painting, and sculpture, and litera- 
ture, and also in the deeds and philan- 
thropies of men, are just those things 
into which the Divine idea has entered 
through the spirit of the doer. Did 
Paul's dreaming of heaven impart no 
tenderness, no sweet courtesy to the tone 
of this Epistle? 

The holiest men who have ever lived 
have worked in one world and lived in 
the other. Did not St. Anthony of 
Padua defend the workingmen and 
traders against the rapacity of the bish- 
ops and the cruelty of the nobles ? The 
saint sighing for heaven to-day is a mar- 
tyr for liberty to-morrow . Telemachus, 
the recluse, flung himself between the 
swords of the gladiators in the arena 
and by his death put an end to such 
combats everywhere. "Play the man, 
Brother Ridley!" cried Latimer at the 
stake to his fellow martyr. "By God's 

i8 5 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

help we will light a candle to-day in 
England that will never be put out!" 

The three greatest names, perhaps, of 
our day in New Testament scholarship 
in the English-speaking world were 
Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort. Was 
there ever a finer combination of the 
practical and the mystical than is found 
in the character of the saintly Westcott, 
the great Bishop of Durham? He was 
engaged with Dr. Hort on a revision of 
the Greek Text of the New Testament, 
writing great commentaries on St. John 
and the Epistle to the Hebrews, pouring 
out the wealth of his scholarship on the 
Revised Version of the English Bible, 
and yet in addition to all this he flung 
himself with ardor into the social ques- 
tions of the hour. We see him confer- 
ring with leaders of Labor Unions, man- 
aging the movement for eight hours' 
work, presiding at a Christian Social 
Union, applying all his energies in the 
186 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

settlement of the Coal-miners' Strike, in 
which was involved the interests of 
thousands of poor homes. With all the 
heat of an honest man he could and did 
rebuke the vices and wrongs of his day. 
And yet with all this he was a mystic. 
He lived in the world of the spirit 
while doing duty in the world of the 
flesh. During the day, in the turmoils 
of social problems; at night, far on till 
midnight on his knees at the altar of the 
vast Cathedral lighted only by the 
moonbeams, wrapt in thought and 
prayer. As a Cambridge scholar says 
of him : "He lived in the height. Some- 
thing of the glory seemed to have de- 
scended on him as with rapt face and 
eyes which saw things hidden from the 
crowd around, he proclaimed the re- 
ality of an unseen world or the coming 
of the universal restoration. He lived 
in constant communion with spiritual 
powers. In the Cathedral or in his own 

187 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Chapel at night the dead seemed very 
near to him." He lived in the world 
of the spirit. 

And how many pastors in crowded 
cities fling themselves with matchless de- 
votion into the struggle for the rights 
of the laborer, for the social betterment 
of men everywhere, for the practical re- 
alization of the Kingdom of God on 
earth, and yet are as saintly in spirit and 
life as any mediaeval saint whose effigy 
ever looked down from his niche in a 
Cathedral, or whose name was ever en- 
shrined in legends of the olden time ! 
Think for a moment of John Richard 
Green, author of "History of the Eng- 
lish People," "Short History of the 
English People," "The Making of Eng- 
land," etc. The other day I picked up 
a volume of his Letters, edited by Les- 
lie Stephen, and read this of him when 
he was a pastor in London. The 
cholera had broken out in his parish. 
188 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

"Within an hour from the first seizure 
in his parish, Green himself met the dy- 
ing patients in the London Hospital, 
and thenceforward while the plague 
lasted, Green, like other clergy in the 
parishes attacked, worked day and night 
amidst the panic-stricken people, as offi- 
cer of health, inspector of nuisances, am- 
bulance superintendent, as well as spir- 
itual consoler and burier of the dead. 
. . . Green helped to secure the re- 
moval of the dead from the houses, and 
his best helpers were the lowest women 
of the town." "It was no uncommon 
thing to see him going to an infected 
house between two such outcasts who 
had volunteered to help him in an er- 
rand of mercy. On one occasion he 
found a man dangerously ill in an upper 
room. Some big draymen in the street 
refused to help. Green, therefore, tried 
to carry the man downstairs. His slight 
frame was unequal to the effort, and the 
189 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

two fell from the top to the bottom of 
the stairs together. The man, who was 
in a state of collapse, was not injured." 
And yet, as Leslie Stephen says, 
"Green's religious sentiment was deep 
and permanent. The spiritual life of 
the mystics, the 'religion of the heart,' 
which subordinates dogmas and histor- 
ical matter of fact to the emotions, was 
entirely congenial to him." 

This man Paul, whose task is the re- 
demption of an Empire, the welding of 
diverse nationalities and tongues into 
one common brotherhood in Christ Je- 
sus, is no weakling. And who has re- 
vealed to us the radiant splendors of the 
Unseen but the very disciples of him 
who went about doing good, men, 
strange to say, with his peace in their 
hearts but whose lives were spent in 
everlasting combat with the wrongs of 
humanity? Man shall not live by bread 
alone, said Jesus, who lived in two 
190 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

worlds. He who goes down the street 
to plead the cause of a widow in the 
police-court, to visit some invalid in a 
back alley, to vote against some social 
wrong or civic crime, may see above the 
sky-scrapers and smoke of the town "the 
City of God coming down from God 
out of Heaven adorned as a bride for 
her husband." Above the din of the 
crowd and the roar of traffic he may 
hear the sweet far-away chimes in the 
Eternal City and carry that music with 
him wherever he goes. 

There are in this loud, stunning tide 

Of human care and crime 
With whom the Melodies abide 

Of th' Everlasting Chime! 
Who carry music in their heart 
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, 
Plying their task with busier feet 
Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat. 

If some bright angel of God should 
veil his glory, and coming into our life, 
ioi 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

should put on our clothes and go out 
into the street to help men everywhere, 
we should all feel that an extraordinary 
person had been among us. The heaven 
within him would be heard in his voice, 
seen in his eye, felt in his touch and in 
the benediction of his presence. "Where 
shall I put the Fra Angelico?" "Dear 
old Beato," said Violet, "put him op- 
posite the door, that he may give a 
sensation of peace and beauty to every 
one who enters the room." So with 
those who carry the heavens in their 
heart, and yet long to pull up anchor 
and sail away. Everywhere men know 
them among the swarms of mere phi- 
lanthropists, reformers, and world- 
menders, with their social programs and 
Christless cure-alls for universal ills. 
Forgetting bread and social wrong, men 
of heart are drawn to them as steel to 
a magnet, and by them are lifted out of 
their poor selves into worlds of light 
192 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

and moral beauty, thus themselves be- 
coming ministering angels to their 
broken fellows, which seems to be some- 
how very practical idealism. 

Then let it not be forgotten that the 
arena of public life is not for all. There 
is a wonderful variety in life. To some 
is given to serve in legislative halls or 
to battle for civic righteousness ; to fight 
fiercely against entrenched iniquity, and 
in doing so to mingle with the savage 
elements of lowest society. Others serve 
in the building of great industries, or in 
the management of financial interests, 
while to a few others may be given the 
thankless task of defending truth. 

But not all of us are built for the dust 
and grime. There are some outside the 
crowd who can not stand up against the 
wrangle and controversy of life. The 
law of the jungle is not for them. But 
they are not the less useful for all that. 
For, as George Eliot says in "Middle- 
13 193 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

march" "That things are not so ill with 
you and me as they might have been is 
half owing to the number who lived 
faithfully a hidden life and rest in un- 
visited tombs." Life's coarseness, its 
vices and tragedies, are too much for 
many gentle souls to be attracted by it, 
just as cultured folks, nurtured in fine 
feeling and courtliness of manner, look 
with horror on the stockyard behavior 
of the ruthless and crass. They shrink 
from the rougher side of life and think 
of a purer and sweeter life — not neces- 
sarily of 

— A place where pearly streams 

Glide over silver sand, 
Like childhood's rosy, dazzling dreams 

Of some far faery land. 
— A clime where diamond dews 

Glitter on fadeless flowers, 
And mirth and music ring aloud 

From amaranthine bowers; 

194 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

but where the spiritual life is great and 
clear and "self-continuous as the change- 
less sea." 

Such souls are not pessimists. They 
are not cynics, despising God's world 
and its innocent joys which gladden the 
day, woman's love, and children's laugh- 
ter. St. Francis Assisi used to call the 
birds "Our little brothers of the air." 
But these contemplative souls know life, 
and because they know it in all its moods 
and tenses is the why they seek a better 
country — a city which hath foundations 
of eternal reality, whose Builder and 
Maker is God. They love to meditate 
on the bliss awaiting the Sons of the 
Morning, not because they are unhappy 
here, but because to them it is given to 
sing songs of the Celestial City and to 
dream dreams which shall sweeten the 
common life, shall put mighty vigor and 
motive into that life, and wean men 
from the belittling materialism of the 

195 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

daily grind. How enriched is life be- 
cause of these streams of inspiration 
which flow down to us from these hills 
of vision ! Think of Faber's 

Oh Paradise! Oh Paradise! 

The world is growing old. 
Who would not be at rest and free 

Where love is never cold? 

Or of Samuel Rutherford's ecstatic joy 
on his death-bed as he mused on Im- 
manuel's Land: 

The little birds at Anworth, I used to count 

them blest; 
Now, beside happier altars I go to build my 

nest. 
O'er these there broods no silence, no graves 

around them stand; 
For glory, deathless, dwelleth in Immanuel's 

Land. 

Such melodies of the Life Immortal ex- 
press the yearnings of every heart in its 
best moods, and in strengthening men 
196 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

struggling with life's hard problems. 
Furnishing heartening ideals, they per- 
form the highest service. 

The most beautiful hymn that was 
ever written, perhaps, is Bernard of 
Cluny's 

Jesus, the very thought of Thee, 

which voices the longing of the soul to 
behold the face of its Lord. But in 
"O Mother, dear Jerusalem," the un- 
known saint of the eighth century who 
wrote it seems to break his heart, as a 
child for its mother, for a glimpse of his 
heavenly home : 

Thy walls are made of precious stone, 
Thy bulwarks diamond square ; 

Thy gates are all of Orient pearl — 
Oh God, if I were there! 

And thus in every age great souls 
have desired to pull up anchor and sail 
away. They long for the sinless life, 
197 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

the stainless robe. It is therefore no 
wonder that in contrast to the poor earth 
life with its cloudy mornings and trou- 
bled nights, its sin and strivings, St. 
Bernard of Cluny should sing of the 
Homeland and set sweet souls singing 
after him his immortal lines : 

For thee, Oh dear, dear country, 

Mine eyes their vigil keep; 
For very love beholding 

Thy happy name they weep; 
The mention of thy glory 

Is unction to the breast, 
A medicine in sickness, 

And love and life and rest. 

Then, as we grow old and the 
shadows begin to lengthen, what is more 
natural than that we should think of the 
Land where the sun never goes down, 
and of the loved ones who went away in 
the long ago ! " We have not forgotten 
them. We have carried their image in 
the soul of our soul through all the 
198 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

years, in all lands, and under all skies. 
We would see them again! There are 
many things that were left unsaid, many 
things, perhaps, we would explain. 
Faith in the good God encourages the 
conviction that the mother here will not 
be childless there. She will again clasp 
her child left motherless here. The 
loyal lover shall again meet the one he 
loved on earth and shall walk with her 
in white on the Hills of God. For, let 
us not forget that nowhere in all the 
universe shall we lose our humanity. 
We leave everything here this side of 
the curtain except ourselves. Memory 
survives, love survives, all that God has 
put into the human heart survives, and 
no natural hunger of the soul shall re- 
main unsatisfied forever. 

"All that we have willed or hoped or dreamed 
of good shall exist: 
Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor 
good, nor power, 
I 99 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives 
for the Melodist 
Where eternity affirms the conception of 
an hour. 
The high that proved too high, the heroic for 
earth too hard, 
The passion that left the ground to lose 
itself in the sky, 
Are music sent up to God by the lover and 
the bard; 
Enough that He heard it once; we shall 
hear it by-and-by." 

If all this should seem to some supe- 
rior souls a very human conception of 
heaven, if they are so far removed from 
what they are pleased to call human 
weaknesses, the long reach of the soul 
for its very own, real vision and happy 
fellowship with all we love for evermore 
— if all this be a material, sensuous idea 
of the glories that await us — then let 
them give us something better, that we 
may strengthen ourselves with it in the 
heat and toil of this uncertain life. 
200 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

Longing for home is no weakness. 
It is a means of grace. Thinking of 
that stainless life we feel the degrada- 
tion of sin. We know there is no sin 
there. Nothing that defileth enters 
those gates of pearl. The saints live 
there, and we know that if ever we shall 
live with them there we must be just 
like them here. And such is the help- 
fulness of God's grace co-operating with 
the laws of our nature that we do be- 
come like them by thinking of them, and 
of the King in His beauty, and the Land 
that is far off. For who can dwell with 
holy thoughts and not become holy? 
We grow like that we think the most 
of. And it seems to us that it is worth 
while to fall asleep betimes at Bethel 
and see the Heavens open, or to stand 
beside the holy John at Patmos and hear 
him say, "I beheld and lo a great mul- 
titude which no man could number of 
all nations, and kindreds, and people, 
201 



THE WINGLESS HOUR 

and tongues stood before the throne, 
and before the Lamb, clothed with 
white robes and palms in their hands, 
and cried with a loud voice saying, Sal- 
vation to our God which sitteth upon the 
throne and unto the Lamb. . . . And 
they shall hunger no more, nor thirst 
any more, neither shall the sun light on 
them, nor any heat, for the Lamb 
which is in the midst of the throne shall 
feed them and shall lead them unto liv- 
ing fountains of waters, and God shall 
wipe away all tears from their eyes." 

A weakness is it to long to depart 
and to be with Christ? The poet Sted- 
man sings: 

Could we but know 
The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel, 
Where lie those happier hills and meadows 
low. 
Ah, if beyond the spirit's utmost cavil 

Aught of that country could we surely 
know — 

Who would not go? 
202 



THE LONGING FOR HOME 

Might we but hear 
The hovering angels' high imagined chorus 
Or catch, betimes, with wakeful eyes and 
clear, 
One radiant vista of the realm before us, 
With one rapt moment given to see and 
hear — 

Ah, who would fear? 

Were we quite sure 
To find the peerless friend who left us lonely, 
Or there by some celestial stream as pure 
To gaze on eyes that here were love-lit only — 
This mortal coil, were we quite sure, 
Who would endure? 

Well, Paul was quite sure. John was 
quite sure. And He who came from 
there and went back there to prepare a 
place for us, said, "They that do right- 
eousness shall shine as the Sun in the 
Kingdom of My Father." 



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